KILLED AND INJURED WHILE WINCHING. WINCHING 101 | JailBreak Overlander
Summary
Transcript
So for today’s episode, we got the sandy cats kinetic x rope hooked up to the boat. How do you feel about this, sir? I’m pretty excited. All right, well, let’s fucking get it going. Safe. You haven’t figured it out. This video is going to be about winching winching trucks safely because there are way too many times people have gone winching and it hasn’t worked out well for them whatsoever at all.
A lot of people have gotten hurt, maimed and killed, simply winching on their day off out enjoying the wilderness, out in a mud pit, et cetera. And then something like this happens. You so a couple of years back, Yokohama sent me a set of 37 inch mud grapplers or their mud terrain tire, and I was testing them out in the Ozarks, a place I was very familiar with and a place that is very unforgiving.
I did this completely alone in the wintertime, and it was a rainy season, and I sunk the truck to the rails. But I got out my tree saver, I got out my toe strap, and I pulled the line on my 16,500 pound red winch, which was sporting am steel blue line. And with an awful lot of time, energy and effort, I managed to slowly wiggle myself out of a really bad spot.
But being a YouTuber and being an off roader, I had an advantage. I’ve hung out with Rory Irish from Trailmater out in Moab, Utah, and been on dozens of recoveries with him, and he taught me a lot of things, and he wasn’t the only one. I’ve gone to the overland Expos and hooked up with Tim and Elsie from Dirt Sunrise, and these guys are extrication experts and they taught me a lot of things as well.
So when I’m rolling solo out in the Ozarks, miles from anybody else, I make sure that I carry my max tracks, a shovel and all the recovery gear, kinetic ropes, toe straps, and a 16,000 pound winch. And after a lot of time, energy and effort, I managed to extricate myself very, very slowly. This took me about a total of three and a half, 4 hours, I believe. And fortunately, I had a winch line extender because the tree line was a good 150ft away, and that is really, no pun intended, stretching it.
So that recovery went well. But again, I’ve been trained by experts and I have extricated myself solo numerous times. But for every successful winch line extrication that happens, you’ve got these things happening. And this is no joke, because not only are people getting hurt, but it hurts the sport. Every time somebody gets killed or maimed, somebody wants to pass a law. So this information is vital. If you’re going off road, especially solo, you need to know this info.
So when I decided to make this video, I needed to find somebody that I could consider an expert, someone that people couldn’t argue with. There’s a lot of people out there, a lot of people that I know, I’m showing them in the video right now that make videos explaining the dangers of winching the right the wrong way to do it. But the problem is, we need some sort of a standardized winching technique protocol, because every time you see somebody winching it wrong, the winch comes directly through the driver’s window, right over the steering wheel, and takes out the driver.
And it has killed too many people, and it’s injured way too many people. So I’m not an expert. I know enough about winching and traveling solo to get by pretty much in any situation. And there you go. So I had to find somebody that not only was an off roader, but somebody with other experience. And I found that with Olig Flaxman. He’s the owner of sandy cats and kinetic ropes.
I’ll leave links below. But not only that, the guy’s a mountain climber. He’s been mountain climbing since he was a kid, depending on rope. And he learned all about rope because your life depends on it, especially up here, because no one can hear you scream. So Olig has four wheel drive winching in his pedigree. He’s also got mountain climbing in his pedigree. And that’s pretty damn good, is it not? But he goes even one step further because Olig is a search and rescue guy in California.
And literally, last night, he went out and got injured from the Blackhawk helicopter that picked him up. He’s good to go, but, I mean, he’s out there risking his life trying to save others. And once again, when you’re out there risking your life on search and rescue, you have to depend on rope. So this is the trifecta right here. So without further ado, let’s hear from Oleg himself, shall we? Here we go.
Hey, guys. I’m Oleg. This is sandy cats. We do have a company with Kinetic X where we sell recovery gear. After a lot of thoughts, I decided to do this video just because people are getting hurt. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and there’s no standardization in offroad recoveries. So I just kind of want to give my thoughts on it? My background is I’ve been wheeling since 2008, but I’ve been climbing since way before then.
I’ve been alpine climbing, mountaineering. I do search and rescue. I know rope systems really, really well. So I think I have an approach that may be different than some from a systems perspective in this world. So I just want to kind of give the thoughts out on safety and how to do recoveries from my perspective. The first thing I’ll say is there’s really three types, right? It’s winching, toe straps and or snatch straps and kinetic recoveries.
And I kind of want to go through all that because there’s some misconceptions. At kinetic X we primarily focus on small and big kinetic ropes. And I’ll tell you right now, this is the most dangerous part of any recovery, is a kinetic rope. And oftentimes should be either used wisely or as a last resort. Right now we’re not selling toe straps, but this is probably one of the safest.
So I’m going to try to be as unbiased as I can about this subject. The safest things in a recovery. The safest recovery that you can do is a winch. Using a winch, as long as you use it appropriately. Most winches are rated for 10,000 pounds. If you are using solely a synthetic line, no cables and there’s no metal in the system at all. Zero. I believe that a winch is going to be the safest, worst case scenario.
If that synthetic line snaps, the winch, if there’s no metal in the system is just going to drop. There’s no kickback, nothing flying through your windshield as long as your attachment points are sufficient. Because that winch is rated to 10,000 pounds, chances are it’s not breaking the steel off your bumper or shearing your grade eight or grade ten bolts. So that’s my first recommendation. So this is my winch on my jeep.
It’s not connected to the battery right now, so I can’t put it in. But you will see that I have no metal here. And that’s what I mean by no metal, no metal receivers, shackles, whatever. I connect this directly to a soft shackle. So therefore if there’s a failure, no metal is flying. This just flops on this vehicle the way I have it set up. This is easy to get to.
You get these winches with a hook, take the hook off. There’s usually some kind of metal thimble here. I do recommend taking the metal thimble off because a lot of times they’re pretty cheap. And if you’re just pulling on that metal thimble with a soft shackle, it can start to bend and it’ll slice your winch cable. So you want to have nothing here. If you want to put a sleeve protector, simple.
We’re going to put a video up late eventually, but there’s a lot of videos out there. How to slice your cable. I strongly recommend you learn how to do that because you could have the best winch line in the world. You could have the cheapest Amazon line in the world. It doesn’t matter. These things break all the time. They are super strong. When you pull the second, especially under tension, you just touch it with a rock, these things start slicing.
So you need to know how to make your own hoop in the field. I recommend you learn how to do that and practice on your winch cable. It’s not hard. Yankum sells this awesome fairlead that I have on the jeep and I love it. And the whole point of it is you put your hoop right here and once your winch line is cinched in, everything is protected. So your line is completely protected from rock abrasion.
So that’s why this is a great fairlead for most people. This should work. Some bumpers don’t accept these fair leads. So I want to walk you over to my other foreigner. So this is my foreigner. As you can see, I don’t have the Yankeem fair lead here. The reason I don’t have it here is because it doesn’t fit in my bumper. That’s the only reason. But on my wife’s foreigner, on our GX, we don’t have the income fair lead either.
Just because it’s not a cheap bear lead and we don’t rock crawl. So in those circumstances, I either will just have the winch line connected to my shackle or clevis anywhere, or on my personal one, I put it back here, connect it to my clutch. Very simple. You don’t need expensive air leads. You just need to get rid of all the metal in your system. That’s all I’m asking you to do.
The second you get rid of all this metal and you start working on with soft shackles only. That’s where the safety really comes in. So that’s really what I recommend. Put it in and I’m good to go. Like I said, I’m a wife’s foreigner. It hangs like this. Why? She doesn’t rock well, so she’s not going to be hitting rocks with the lines it’s fine. It’s safe enough.
Okay, so this is a toe strap. Some of these look like toe straps. Some of these are called snatch straps. They have very little elasticity in it. And here’s the thing. These are actually meant for towing, not recoveries. That’s the reality. And the reason why is because they’re very good with abrasion. When you’re hitting on the ground, they don’t have any elasticity like you see with kinetic ropes.
These work really, really well when you want very slow, controlled recoveries. I’ll connect it. I don’t remember last time I used this on a forerunner. I do use this on the jeep a lot. The reason why is because I’m on big boulders, and my jeep is high centered on a big boulder somewhere. And I want somebody to just give me a couple of hundred pounds of pressure to ease me off that boulder so I don’t start breaking more parts.
That’s where this comes into play. If you’re stuck heavily in the mud, in the sand and snow, you’re going to have to for this to work. Pretend this is toe strap, and this is the stuck vehicle. This is the unstuck vehicle. If I take the toe strap and I go like that, which is what you see people do with the kinetic rope. What ends up happening is that you’re going to cause so much.
There’s no give in this rope. It’s like a static rope. So you’re going to start causing damage everywhere. A your bat’s going to hurt a lot. You’re going to start damaging your bumper. Your bumper could start shearing off your frame. So with a toe strap, your recovery, you have to pretension it and then do very slow pulls. So it’s kind of doing the same thing as a winch would do in reality.
And there’s a lot of applications for it, especially if you don’t have a winch in your rock crawling, or you need to do some position that you can’t do with your winch. That’s where this really applies. Or if you’re going to tow somebody, right, for a couple of miles. But that’s really what that application is for. And this is a kinetic recovery rope. This is ours. This is some of our competition on Amazon.
We can discuss that in a second. But what’s more important is, out of everything we discussed and any type of recovery you’re going to do, this is going to be the most dangerous part of any recovery. Why? Because this is the only thing that stores kinetic energy. So the reason why synthetic gear is amazing soft gear is because with synthetic gear, if there’s no kinetic energy stored, in general, it usually drops.
It’s not flying anywhere. With a kinetic rope, energy is stored. And some of you guys may have even seen a video on YouTube recently lately where a vehicle is pulling really hard with a kinetic rope, and that kinetic rope flew through a windshield and thankfully didn’t kill anybody, but could have easily killed somebody. There’s other ways this will cause a lot of damage, to the point where this can cause enough damage, and it almost happened in that video, to take the bumper off your frame to shear your bolts.
There’s a lot of power going on here, so this needs to be treated with respect and used in only certain situations. There’s a lot of applications where kinetic growth comes into play. When you need a. When you don’t have a winch, a lot of times it’s necessary b if you’re using it properly. The absorption that it takes within the rope itself, and I’ll describe that in a second, is very, very doesn’t hurt your vehicles as much as any other application, and it will give you stronger pulling power, but you need to be smart about it.
So let’s kind of discuss what this really is and what the use of it is. The best way I kind of tell people as far as what a kinetic rope is versus anything else, and why it’s important is I’m a climber, right? If you watch videos of guys climbing, I’ve climbed walls and on climbing rope have about less elasticity than this. About 1012 percent, sometimes more. 20% elasticity on a climbing rope.
On a climbing rope, if you take a fall, I’ve taken 30 foot falls and the rope caught me. Nothing broken. I could keep climbing. It just hurts a little bit. If I would take a static rope, which is what this is, basically, and I only took a five to eight foot fall on a climbing rope, I can potentially shatter my pelvis because the absorption of the rope takes the impact.
In essence. Therefore, you guys will see me do a lot of stupid testing on Instagram and YouTube with like a Cadillac or other cars where I tie this rope to a tree and I pull really hard. Don’t pull that hard. That was just me testing and proving the application. If I would have done that with a toe strap, then a, my airbag may have went off. I definitely would have broken a lot of parts.
I’d have metal flying everywhere. My back would have felt it for weeks. I did it with a kinetic rope. I barely felt it in my back and I was going way above the recommended speed that I would ever tell you to go above. Therefore, that’s the first thing, the second thing that you need to know, and is extremely important to know and most people don’t understand this, is you have to size your kinetic rope properly.
If you think about it, it’s like a rubber band, right? So if you take a rubber band and you try to pull on it and it’s a thin rubber band, you’re going to break it. If it’s a rubber band rated to your muscle strength and you pull on it, you’ll just get full elasticity, let go of fly. But if you get like on a four inch thick rubber band and try to pull on it, you won’t even move it.
So therefore, if you take a rope that if you have a forerunner from the factory plus your weight is like 7000 pounds, and you take a one and a half inch or one and a quarter inch rope, maybe even a one inch rope, but that rope is rated for a vehicle much higher than yours. You basically have a ridiculously overpriced toe strap. And the second you try to use it as a kinetic rope versus a toe strap, you’re going to break components on your car.
You can start breaking parts and things can start flying one way or another. And the same thing, if you use an underrated rope, if you use an underrated rope just to that thin rubber band, you will just break through it. So you need to make sure the kinetic rope is based on your vehicle weight. Most manufacturers should tell you that very clearly if they don’t run away. Now that we got through all that, when you start using a kinetic rope, the first thing that I personally do is you inspect everything.
You make sure that you have places to go. Meaning that if you’re in deep snow and deep mud and deep sand, that there’s no log over there, that’s going to give you a hard hit and cause issues. You shovel as much as you can, throw max trucks in there, throw boards in there, give yourself as much chance to get out of that situation, to utilize the rope to as minimal strength as necessary for the pulling.
That’s really the goal here. Don’t just say, okay, I’m stuck in 4ft of snow, go 20 miles an hour and get me out of here. That’s how mistakes happen. People rush people, injuries occur. So that’s the first thing I want to say about kinetic rope. When I start a kinetic rope recovery and I do them a lot, I’m going to demonstrate with this little strand here. I do the same thing as I do with a tow strap.
If my rope is properly rated for my vehicle and I pretension the rope and then start pulling, I’m already probably adding between 8% to 12%, maybe even a little more of elasticity into the system, just with my vehicle weight pulling the other vehicle. So this vehicle is stuck and I pretension it like this, and then I start pulling. The kinetic energy will already help me. You don’t need to go 50 miles an hour to get that energy.
That’s very important. If that doesn’t work, I’ll back up. You don’t have to back up a lot. I back up a couple of feet. Usually back up. If your office 30ft, you should back up about 25% of that. I’ll back up and I’ll go a mile an hour. I’ll back up again. I’ll go 2 miles an hour. Maybe I’ll go to 3 miles an hour then if that doesn’t work, because at that point, the force of my vehicle, my vehicle is the only one contributing force into a system.
The vehicle that’s stuck is contributing zero force into a system. Therefore, I’m using a rope that is rated for my vehicle only, not for the vehicle that’s stuck. At that point, I know I’m contributing so much force into the system that something’s not working. I’m going to get out, reassess the situation, see if I could help that vehicle move by throwing boards in max tracks, shoveling a little bit, then I’ll do the same thing again.
Only at some point in time, because I do have the experience and knowledge, will I consider going faster. And if I do consider going faster, I will make sure that all my connection points are good. I will make sure that the bumper is properly connected to a frame. I’ll make sure that everything in the system can handle the loads that I’m about to put on the system, which can be 30, 40,000 pounds for all we know, right? I could just guess what the loads are and so can you.
We can’t know for sure. Once I know that everything is connected, there’s no big rock that I’m going to hit in a second where I’m throwing 40,000 pounds of load on and just make a big stop. Only then I may consider going faster. What is going faster? I’m not going to tell you what going faster is, because you need to know what your vehicle weight is, what the rope calls for, that weight, and everything else for you to make that decision.
We don’t recommend going over 5 miles an hour at 5 miles an hour. The other misconception with kinetic ropes, everybody advertises 30% elasticity on ropes. That’s not true. Kind of not true. We advertise it, too. And then we put an MBs. That’s minimum braking strength, maximum braking strength. We can go into that conversation if you want. But more importantly, it’s elasticity. That means 30% elasticity, or approximately, usually anywhere from 29% to 33% elasticity at mbs.
At 30,000 pounds, for a seven, eight rope, we radios to 28,300. But at that rate, the truth is you’re going to probably ten to 14, hopefully not more than 16, 17,000 pounds of force on that rope. So you’re never going to reach 30%. You’re probably going to reach somewhere between 15 to 2020, 2% elasticity max, just so we’re clear. But that’s a lot of energy in the system anyways.
So if you know what forces you have, you know, approximate elasticity you’re putting in that rope, you know the terrain you’re on, so you know how much traction you’re getting, then you can make a decision of how fast to go. We don’t recommend going about 5 miles an hour. We believe that if you use a properly rated weighted vehicle with our ropes, you will get probably around 20%, plus or minus two, depending on the weight of your vehicle.
But I can’t tell you what to do. This book, for example, by Bob Woolers, a lot of people consider this like the ultimate recovery book. It will tell you to go. You can go up to 20 miles an hour for stage three recoveries or something other people tell you don’t go 3 miles an hour. The problem that I have with everything we’re doing here as an industry is the lack of standardization, to be honest with you, and I’m kind of guilty of that myself, we all have to play the game.
I strongly don’t recommend going about 5 miles an hour unless you’re super confident and you know what you’re doing. That’s that. Next is let’s talk a little bit about other options. To be safe with a kinetic rope, the first thing is soft shackles. That video talked a lot about soft shackles that are untested. You. We make our products in China proudly because my goal was to create a kinetic rope that’s affordable.
And I will tell you right now, we are not the best kinetic rope for every application. I think we’re pretty damn good. We focus a lot on safety. That’s really where the focus was. I did a video myself on YouTube a while ago, years ago, and I tested a bunch of ropes and I saw ropes, specifically ropes. I’ll just even say, like, ditch pig things that are sold on home Depot and Lowe’s.
And those ropes had basically no elasticity. And somebody’s going to go watch a YouTube video on pull hard. Go buy that rope from Home Depot for $60. Pull hard and start breaking parts. I broke both of the metal mounts on the jeep with those cheap ropes during those testings. And then there’s ropes that are great, but you don’t know unless you’re buying a well named american brand. And those are very expensive.
And my thing was great. Those are great brands. There’s great brands out there. But if you’re going to go buy $150, $100 Amazon rope, I want you to come to me and we will get you a rope that we tested, we certified. We know it has elasticity, and we know it has all the safety factors so you can be safe. That’s what my goal was initially with this company.
I think we’ve achieved that goal now we’re moving on. We’ll discuss that in a second. So, a lot of ropes you get, they will look like this. I cut them up, show you the inside. They’re very easy to package because they’re such a nice bendable flexi system. But you get what you pay for, right? That’s what makes it worse. Our ropes are stiffer. Our ropes are stiffer because we protect them better.
In addition to that, I think we’re one of the only. There’s probably other guys out there, but not a lot that use. We use green nylon. We don’t use white nylon and then dip it in green paint. We use green nylon simply for one reason, because we put in reflective material in here and we thread it through the entire rope multiple times. And this reflective material works from like half a mile away.
I felt I’d rather pay more for production and get that for one reason only. Most recoveries that I’m doing a lease. It’s on the side of a mountain road where somebody’s stuck in a ditch, and it’s at night, not a lot of traffic. And usually I’m looking for the best traction. So I’m pulling guys in a ditch over here, and I’m pulling this way using the opposite lane, and I’m blocking the entire paved road to pull them out of that ditch.
At night, and nobody’s stopping traffic behind me. Nobody’s stopping traffic in front of me. I’m talking practicality here, not know safety. And that’s why we put this reflective material in there. Because when you’re out of Montana, Idaho, whatever, and you’re in that type of situation, you want to be able to make sure the car that’s flying down the mountain pass sees the rope in the middle. That was my whole goal with this.
One of my goals. We also double dip our eyes. We coat them so they can withstand more abuse. And our sheath here is tighter than most. You say, that’s what she said one more time. I’m going to most. There’s ups and downs for that. We chose to go this route for two reasons. Because in reality, a lot of times when you’re doing a kinetic recovery, you may be recovering a dead vehicle or a vehicle that’s somehow damaged, and you’re going to end up using your kinetic rope as a tow strap.
So we wanted something that will handle the abrasions from you pulling for 510, 15, 20 miles an hour off road slowly, without putting stretch in the system and dragging this on the road and it being able to withstand that. And the second reason is because the easiest way to damage these ropes is a way you will not see. The problem with buying a kinetic rope versus anything else is you can’t see the actual material inside this white stuff is the material that’s inside the rope.
And this is where really the stretch comes, the strength comes, and so on. This is mostly the sheath or the COVID of the rope and protection. When you start getting into these gaps, sand particles in there, and the sand particles start getting in here and you start pulling hard, those sand particles are going to eat through the strength of the rope. Another reason why we use thicker sheath or more sturdier sheath is because we’re trying to avoid things getting inside.
Downside is they are a little bit more rigid and harder to package. So things to consider. That was my little pitch. Like I said, our ropes are made in China. I believe they’re the best material you can get. We test them here with certex. Some of you guys may know who that is. We underrate them a little bit, to be honest with you. So, like our shackles, we buy 41,000 on average is big, between 44 two to 45 five.
So we’re trying to really be safe out there. Our goal is safety. That’s what we’re trying to achieve here. Last time I was in China was in November in this facility. These guys specifically, these guys are very unique. They’re doing things for the chinese navy, but more importantly, they’re doing things for search and rescue out there. They’re doing things for the fire department, they’re doing things for first responders.
And it was actually cool. I mean, I’ll send you a video. You can post it in the facility. They have like a multimillion dollar facility for kids to come visit. And there’s like earthquake room where you stand and you feel an earthquake. There’s a wind room where you could feel 100 miles an hour winds. They will lower kids from like a second story window. So they feel what it feels like to be in a harness and in a screamer suit, basically, and to be lowered down.
So they’re so focused on search and rescue and they’re so focused on first responders. That’s where the mindset of this company comes from. I have no problem supporting them all day long. Let’s keep going. Soft shackles. You will get many options for soft shackles. And this is an issue I see, too. First, I get a lot of questions on how to install a soft shackle, and I’m going to install it right now for you.
It’s very simple. You just open up the loop, you put the knot through, and then when you pull, this loop will hold on the knot. When you pull harder, this loop will dig into the knot. It’s not going anywhere. It is smart if you have the ability. If you have multiple people with you, stay far away. When you pretension your system, somebody’s watching. That doesn’t pop off, but it shouldn’t pop off in reality.
If you simply just pull like this, or put. When your, when your rope is in here, you just pull it a little. That’s already enough pretension to hold. So these are pretty simple to use. The problem is the application. First of all, you shouldn’t be using it here. This is 90 degree metal, and this will eventually start cutting through the soft shackle. So don’t use it in here unless you really, really know what you’re doing.
If you have clevis mounts, mounts like this that have these nine degree turns, and they’re not beveled, they’re not like smooth to your finger. You need to get something like this. Still, if they are smooth to your finger, like, I know that expedition one bumpers, they make them smooth. You could just use straight soft shackle. If they’re not smooth to your finger, use metal. This is going to be smooth.
Okay, so you put this on this is going to be smooth to your finger. And then you can put your soft shackle through here. I don’t consider this metal in the system. This is still metal and metal. The working loads here, they’ll hold, right? You just don’t want to end up using these pieces in between two synthetic pieces of gear. That’s when things start flying and hurting you.
Then you put your self shackle on and you are good to go like that. Pretty simple on a forerunner. I think Tacomas have these two. You need to know. This is what I mean by you need to be very knowledgeable when you start playing with kinetic ropes, especially when you’re going to put heavy forces on. I don’t know why. And I’ve even seen companies, I’m not going to say who, showing this as a recovery point in their Facebook ads.
This is not a recovery point. This is not a recovery point. This is made for when they’re shipping it on a container. I don’t know what the load rating on this is, but it’s definitely not going to be 40, 50,000 pounds, which is really what you want to have. So therefore, be smart. Make sure that your bumper is properly connected to a frame when you start putting heavy loads on.
Like I mentioned, I come at this from a different perspective. I’m trying to bring. I love in mountaineering and alchemism and search and rescue. We have a lot of testing, a lot of trust in our gear, a lot of standardization, a lot of certifications out of everybody I’ve met over the last 15, 10, 15 years. Overlanding, offroading. You have more skin in the game as far as if you’re not climbing a mountain face or an ICE wall depending on rope, you’re hanging from a helicopter, searching and rescuing, trying to find somebody depending on a rope.
So this was a natural, you know what I mean? That’s all I wanted to say. I was hanging on a helicopter, literally going across the river last week, doing the death spin, trying to avoid the death spin. So I want to bring some of that into this world. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet. I have some ideas, but that’s kind of my next goal with the company.
And one of the big things is standardization. We’re starting to create very detailed labels. Some companies already do. I know Factor 55 does, for example. They’re very great labels information. It’s hard to put data termination on this because there’s a lot of factors involved. If you’re going to keep this out in the sun, it’s going to degrade much faster than if you keep it in a cool, dry place.
We are starting to put data production on all ropes, so you kind of are able to figure out when it’s time to retire them. These are consumable items. That’s something to consider. You can get five years out of them, possibly even ten if you know what you’re doing. But they’re still consumables. Things to consider anyways. So the first thing we kind of really worked on is this shackle.
I did a lot of crazy pulls. And if you actually watch those crazy pulls, this went all the way through a hitch receiver, came back around and had a rope connected like this through the entire hitch receiver. And this was sitting on a 90 degree metal. And we were doing a lot of pulls. And then we did certification, we did testing, but more importantly, the field use. Right.
We did a lot of pulls on this and we were able to figure out after about a year and a half, because we went through a lot of iterations of it, how to make this work inside your receiver. We can show you metal in a second that’s hanging on the wall. And we have videos of us putting 36 plus thousand pounds and bending gusseted three eight steel that we beat the hell out of.
But we still tell you don’t go over 20,000 pounds. The truth is, in a hitch receiver you shouldn’t be going above your toe capacity. Another thing to consider, you could buy those big metal pieces that you put in the hitch receiver and they could be rated for 100,000 pounds. But if your hitch receiver is connected to your crossmember and not directly to your frame rails, you’re bending that cross member.
So you shouldn’t be using more weight than what your crossmember can handle. And that’s very hard to gauge in the field. There’s a lot of things out there that you need to know and be comfortable with to really read a system and understand where the weak links are in a system to be able to gauge it. So another thing that I for some reason don’t see used a lot is a bridle.
What is a bridal? A bridle is basically having two connection points instead of one. I never see that used and it makes no sense to me. There’s very few applications where you don’t want to use a bridle. So bridle is basically taking two salt chuckles and figuring out a way to connect them on your rope. It does require a little bit more gear. The easiest way to make a bridle is just.
And I don’t know. I get these on Amazon. They’re cheap and they’re very strong. I never break from these. This is 35,000 pound brake strength, and I kind of believe it for an Amazon product. And you could just use tree savers. Connect a tree saver here. And this little trick right here is very helpful to people that have limited slip. Yes. So instead of pulling one side and then the tire that’s got no grip lights up, this kind of balances it out.
It’s a great idea. That’s a good point. The other thing is, I was in Colorado once doing one of the alpine loop trails. Engineer Patton I forgot which one on my budy was on a rental jeep. I had my Toyota and thing had like a thousand miles on it. Brand new jeep. Everything just died. Nothing was working. Couldn’t start the vehicle. I tried to jump the battery. It wasn’t a battery.
I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t letting the gear shift to move no matter what. Didn’t know it had secondary battery. Try to connect the negative and positive to kill the juice. Reset the memory, whatever. Couldn’t get the jeep to function at all. I ended up being on the back of that vehicle with the tow strap. My buddy was in the middle in the jeep, dead vehicle, and another vehicle was pulling us.
I was the brakes. The vehicle in front was the gas, and we only had one connection point because we didn’t have enough gear to make a bridle at the time. And we’re going down those crazy passes with one connection point. I cannot follow the same line as the guys in front of me because I’m not centered. And that made my situation dangerous. The jeep was a foot and a half away from the ledge because I had to follow him and hold that weight.
I was like, within this far from the ledges all the time. In a recovery, it sucked. A bridle would have centered my load a lot better. So all you do is you take a bridle, but here you need three soft shackles. So basically you have two tree savers, two shackles here, one shackle here, and then you connect your rope to a shackle tube. And when you pull, you kind of equalize the system.
This isn’t a true bridle, but this will work. And what this will allow you to do is put pressure on this recovery point and put pressure on this recovery point and get more centered pull. But the pressure is important because if you potentially go 20 miles an hour or whatever speed you want to go in your kinetic recovery, don’t recommend it. And you’re putting 40,000 pounds of pressure on this one point.
You could start shearing bolts, you can damage. A soft chuckle you could put a lot of damage here. You do this system, now you’re splitting the weight. So now you only have 20,000 pounds here. That’s gold. I mean, I don’t know why people aren’t doing this. So another thing we worked on and we’ve already done, I just don’t have it to show you right now, is we created our own bridle.
There are a few bridles out there on the market. True bridles. I didn’t like any of them. I will tell you why. This is the only one I could show you because we just certified them and I don’t have any solid ones left. They’re coming in two weeks. They’ll be up on our site in about a month. This one broke at 59,180 pounds. At certification, we’re going to rate them to 57,000 pounds about.
But the whole point of this is very simple. I can still show you kind of how it works. You’re going to get big loops like these. It’s going to be 10ft long. It. What you’re going to end up doing is either using a soft shackle or you can go directly with a rope. There’s going to be a sheath on the bridle, so everything will be protected from friction, in essence.
And if this was one bridle and the rope was right here, you have one piece here instead of two. Why is one piece important? Because if you’re pulling a little bit that way or a little bit that way, now the rope will move on the system and it’ll equalize. So you will get way more equalization of the recovery points. That’s important. Why did we create this? I’m not trying to create what’s already out there, because every bridal we saw was either rated at like 20 to 30,000 pounds, some or even 17,000 pounds, because they’re basically just using winchline.
And one company is using a bridle that is made of nylon and has stretch. Ours is made of the same thing your winchline is made of, has no stretch. And I think that a bridle doesn’t need stretch. This part of the system, the anchor part of the system, shouldn’t have any stretch in it at all. Therefore, we made our own. We made it very strong. 60,000 pounds. Because what happens in theory is.
And again this is all like on paper. But if your bridal comes out and you’re halfing the rope you can potentially be losing up to 50%. You’re not really losing 50. You’re probably losing any rope from 20 to 30. But you have the possibility to lose up to 50% of the strength of the rope when you half it. So 59,000 by half. 30,000 pounds. That’s what our ropes are rated for.
That’s why we went this thick and this big. The other benefit of this bridle is a lot of people need extensions. So if you have a 20 foot rope, kinetic rope or even a 30 foot kinetic rope and you need to extend it well now you got a ten foot extension that could definitely handle the load as an extension as well. So multi use. That’s kind of what we’ve been working on.
I believe this really should become more standardized in our recovery systems. There’s way more benefits than faults of having a bridal system. And again this should be on both vehicles. Equalize the load. Less strain there. Cool. After watching that YouTube video about rope going through a windshield a lot of things went through my head and we could talk about the mistakes made there. I am very pleased. And I’m just grateful for the dude that put that video out there.
He’s very humble. Very honest. Very unbiased. And I don’t want to reiterate all the mistakes made or all the ones that weren’t made. I will say that they were using a rope that wasn’t rated for the vehicles. They put this through hard edge. But we’re not sure if that’s where the failure occurred. If the soft chocolate wouldn’t have broken the Bronco’s bolts start to shear. And if that soft chocolate wouldn’t have broken then metal could have started flying and killed somebody else.
There’s always going to be a weak link in a system. What do you want the weak link to be? I don’t want a weak link in a system because I know how much force I’m putting in a system. But if you’re not sure how much force you’re putting in a system. And I get questions all the time. Especially to that video. Should we make the soft shackle a weeklink for me? I don’t think so.
But I can’t make a decision for you. A lot of you guys know this. Know recovery equipment. Have a different take on it than me. May know more things than me. Please share. I love to learn. But the idea that we had to kind of address the problem that happened there for the people that feel that they want a soft shackle to either be a weekly pin assist them, or that feel that they don’t have trust in their soft shackles for whatever reason, is a tether.
So we do have a version that I filed the utility patent on, but. Patent pendant, go dang it. But a tether is not a difficult application, and I want to hear your guys ideas. Tell me. Tell me if I’m right or wrong. I haven’t tested this yet because the only vehicle I’m willing to really test this on, it means that I have to put a ton of weight into my rope, have it snap back, and then try to stop that snap back.
I’m only willing to do that with the jeep. So hopefully in two weeks we’ll get it running and we’re going to start doing live testing. But it’s very simple. You have your rope connected like this to one recovery point, because you’re not using a bridle for some reason. You take paracord or some kind of thin material. I’m guessing we want it to break around 300 to 550 pounds.
I’ll talk to you about that in a second. I tied a double fisherman into the rope. I have about 10ft of rope that’s going to break at 550 pounds. So that’s the simplest way to do it. And what I want to do is you could do this once around the rope. So just put it all the way through, kind of loop it, and you’ll catch the rope over here above the knot.
Or if anybody here is a climber, you can basically make a prostick by looping it twice. In essence, that puts friction here. There’s going to be friction because rope on rope. So this thing isn’t moving or it should be moving. There’s ways to tie this, but for simplicity, without dealing with knots at all, we’ll take any soft checker you have lying around and we’ll take this tether and put it anywhere.
It doesn’t have to be on another recovery point. It could be right here on the bull bar or the bump. It’s not taking a 20,000 pound load. This tether is going to break at 550 pounds. So as long as whatever point you’re putting it on will hold 550 pounds, you’re good to go. So the theory behind this, in my head, correct me if I’m wrong, is if for whatever reason, I wanted to have my soft shackle be the weak link I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t or just for safety, for failures.
When, if this breaks, or even if the loop breaks or the line comes out of the loop, which I’ve seen, I’ve broke test other people’s ropes, I’m not going to say who’s. And I’ve actually seen it come apart before the rope broke, usually in the middle. If any of that happens, this tether will. And this breaks through, this tether should catch the rope. It’s not catching 30,000 pounds.
It’s just kind of like using a blanket on a winchline. Those things are what, five pounds, maybe eight pounds? And they’re catching the same type of force. 20, 30,000 pounds of force. Sometimes flying. That’s all you’re really trying to do is catch that force from prevent this rope from being whipped into the car. That’s the whole goal. Now what can happen? And the reason why I want this tether to be weak is because I think this is about the way that I need to catch the rope.
But if the driver that’s driving fast doesn’t notice that there was a malfunction in the system, and he drives through the tether by that time, because there’s so much room in the system, the kinetic energy will snap back. It’ll be caught, or most of it would have been caught. And then when he drives through this rope and breaks this rope, he doesn’t need a lot of force to break it.
He’s not going to recharge the rope with more kinetic energy because 550 pounds will not recharge the rope with kinetic energy. So that’s kind of the safest idea I could think of for now. To prevent systems like this. That is very simple. I mean, this is something you could make yourself in two minutes. Add it to your recovery kit on both sides, and if you don’t know how to tie a knot, don’t worry about it.
Get two cheap soft shackles. They don’t have to be 50,000 pound rated. They could be 5000 pound rated because your rope is only 550 pounds. So they could be super cheap Amazon soft shackles that have. One goal is to catch the snapback if it occurs. This is me. This is my mindset and how I think from my dealing with ropes. We created this product for the hitch receiver.
And the most used application for this product now is for tow companies to throw around their wheels. So what happens is tow companies, I guess I didn’t know this. They tow a lot. A lot, actually. I kind of did, but not as much as I thought. Through their wheels, they want to wrap a wheel and pull that way. They love this because this can go on sharp wheels without an issue.
So our next product we’re coming out with very shortly, it’s going to be something similar to this bridle. It’s going to be 8ft and it’s going to have this sheath. So it’s specifically for the towing industry, where you could have an eight foot soft shackle that’s going to go straight through a wheel or two and you pull that way if you need to. We have other products coming out, too.
Some of them are patent pending, some that I really want to discuss right now. But I’m trying really to bring as much synthetic into the industry as possible, as much safety with creative ideas into the industry as possible, without breaking your bank, number one, and without introducing more metal into systems where they don’t need to be. So that’s pretty much it. I don’t know. Okay. If you enjoyed this video and you understand the gravity of this, way too many people are getting hurt by simply using ropes that they got here, there and everywhere.
And it’s going to end up getting the trails closed and it’s leaving people without a family member. We got to stop that. Links will be below, like share and subscribe. I’m out. Closer. .
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