All my ropes have eye terminations. This does not allow the rope to be fed into and through and around the cleated drum. There is no way to apply the rope come-a-long midline, so if your rope is long, you may need to pull a good length through until you can start tensioning- then after doing whatever you're doing you have to simultaneously disengage both the pawl
and the ratchet (two-handed operation) and pulling rope back through at the same time
.
It's anything but fast, but does what it does uniquely well. I've had mine onboard for about ten years and have used it about ten times. It doesn't get much use, but is still a valuable tool to have in the arsenal.
I have used it to get a truck unstuck (it wasn't badly stuck, just needed that little oomph), anchored to a distant tree. The other day we had a log arch carrying a big log in a deep back yard. We had to roll it out by hand, over uneven terrain and couldn't do the whole run on human push power alone. The rope winch allowed us to solve the problem with hardly a bump in the day, except I had to cut off an eye termination in the pull rope to use it.
It's affordable to begin with, and just getting past the two described issues alone made it worth having in the kit. It's a tool that doesn't take up much room.
I don't know how you can stuff a 5/8" rope in there, though, pretty tight fit with a half inch diameter rope.