I can only repeat what’s been said.
I’ve got a 9.5 Superwinch bought new about 12 years ago. I swapped the wire for dyneema before ever using it, and I’ve used it a lot for deep mud self-recovery, as well as the occasional tree-trunk drag and so forth.
Slug-slow, but that’s safest, it’s never let me down. I pulled it apart once and greased it, but that’s all.
As an older model, it had 2 chrome steel bars joining the two halves together either side of the drum. They rusted terribly, so I had 2 stainless steel bars turned up and threaded identical to the originals, and with a coat of paint the winch looks reasonable considering it’s age.
I free-spool it from time to time and every year I run out the rope to check and wash it. Just bundle it in a bucket of luke-warm water with a bit of clothes-wash powder, and give it a good bit of agitation in the water. You’ll see what comes out of it if you’ve used it in mud, about 1/2 kilo of sand is left in my bucket when I wash it.
Give it a good rinse, stretch it out to dry and then I haul the truck up the garden slope from a tree, puts just the right tension on the rope to pack it nicely on the drum.
Reel it in with a random side to side motion, don’t wind it in like a perfect spiral to make it look like a brand new drum of cable. The random criss-crossing stops the rope from cutting through the bundle right down the the drum on heavy pulls, ‘cos when that happens, you can spend 1/2 a day trying to free the rope-jam.
I’m not sure how long it will go for, I managed to run it down to a stall when I was pulling Chas out of a river here, so it’s not as powerful as it used to be. I should have had the snatch-block rigged back to a recovery point, 1/2 speed but double the pulling power, but as always, you tend to just hook up and pull, not realizing that an overland 80 bogged into 1/2m of silt and full of water is probably going to need a 20 tonne pull to shift it
Anyway, it pulled him out, eventually.