[Gwagensteve]

Thought this was of general interest outside of my build thread, so I'd throw it in here.

I've just picked myself up a Carbon Offroad recovery ring.

Our club strongly recommends soft shackles now for obvious safety reasons, and the weight and bulk of snatch blocks always bugged me (and I reckon they're a bit of a pain to use)

Anyway, here goes:

The old school combination, 3 1/4 ton shackle, ARB snatch block. This is plastic pulley version so probably already lighter than the more common steel pulley version.



3.072kg.

New school - soft shackle/ recovery ring,



less than one sixth of the weight.

Also, there is lots of carry on that these rings aren't safe because the rope can fall out of the ring and end up rope on shackle.

My response to this is your winch is too slow but in reality, this is easy to prevent. A strong rubber band, reusable cable tie or velcro cable tidy will keep the shackle tight around the ring if the winch rope goes slack.



As I think I've discussed before, I use endless slings now rather than tree trunk protectors, dyneema winch extension and a drive tech 3000kg recovery rope.

In fact, I just put all my recovery gear together and weighed it, and it's 6.5kg all up.

That's
2X soft shackles
1X 6m endless sling
1X 2m endless sling
Recovery rope (snatch strap)
20m winch extension
Recovery ring

[BZOOK]

Nice work. I knew a snatch block was heavy but that surprised me.

[Beery]

Impressive final weight for sure. I'm slowly building my recovery equipment so this is quite interesting to me.

What's your reasoning for endless slings over other, more popular ropes/straps? I had never really heard of them being used in a recovery situation before, but i'm not really sure why. They seem like they would be more versatile and easier to handle.

I assume you would have ~30+ metres of rope on your on your winch, do you find yourself using the 20m extension much?

I like the look of that drive tech rope, I might pick one of them up, its rare to find one rated that low.

[Gwagensteve]

Cheers Beery

Tree protectors are always too short and aren't versatile enough. As you point out, endless slings are more versatile and easier to handle. They also slip nicely around tube crossmembers, around nodes on roll cages etc where a tree protector is a pain.

I also like using actual lifting gear where possible rather than recovery gear as lifting gear has a known WLL and a huge safety margin, where recovery gear doesn't.

Yes, I have 100' of rope, so I guess that's ~25m usable. The extension is more so I can extend a snatch strap or pull a car around a corner. I bought it years ago before I had a winch on piggles but it's light and compact enough there's no reason not to take it with me.

Yeah, the drive tech rope is a winner. They stretch properly when used on a Sierra, unlike regular snatch straps.

[shakes]

Interesting on the sling. Do wrap it around the tree and join the 'ends' with a shackle? or do you 'choke' the tree? or situation dependent?
No damage to the tree even though its thin?

What sort of weight rating are you using?

I'm about to set up the permanent kit for the vit, so this is nice to see.

[Gwagensteve]

Situation dependent. I use green slings so 2t rated for lifting, with a 5-6:1 safety factor (can’t remember which) I’m not going to break it.