4x4 Soft Shackles vs Bow (Steel) Shackles

good eye guys soft shackles are becoming more and more popular more companies are making them more people are buying them but there seem to be quite a few misconceptions about soft shackles so in today's video we're going to talk about the pros and cons of soft shackles the pros and cons of both shackles and also dry I'm going to try and clear up a few misconceptions about soft shackles so let's get into it now before we get into talking about the soft shackles we need to talk a little bit about safety so recovery points if you go out for driving you should have proper recovery points fitted this is a factory tie-down point it's made for the transportation of the vehicle on a truck pretty much this here is an aftermarket recovery point now it's quite funny that the company that makes this ARB doesn't actually say what they're rated to what their minimum breaking strain is or what their working load is but they do say it is suitable for 8,000 kilograms snatch recoveries so it's a fairly hefty point and it's definitely going nowhere this you should not use this if you're really stuck and you have to use it do everything you can to make as less friction as you can in the recovery so remove as much dirt sand mud from in front of the tires as you can and anything no the vehicles hung up on just get rid of that as well just to put a little strain as you can on this point alright guys second thing in any recovery situation only use rated recovery gear so this snatch strap here 8100 kilograms that's the minimum breaking strength of this strap this tree-trunk strap here 12,000 kilograms now the other thing is is you've got to make sure that your straps are in good condition otherwise this little tag on the strap means nothing if the stitching is coming undone if there's Nick's or cuts in it it's not going to be as strong as it's meant to be now to illustrate this point I've got this piece of rope here now this piece of rope is rated to 2.9 tonnes or is it ou might look at that cut in the rope so what's this piece of rope actually rated - well it's rated to go into the bin it's be used that's pretty much what it comes down to so if you've got some straps that are old they've got a few cuts and Nick's in them the stitching is coming undone or they've been in the Sun too long just get rid of them because you don't want to be the reason that somebody doesn't come home from a full drive trip it's no joke guys all right last thing is what these shackles actually rated to you because even this seems to have a fair bit of confusion around it so the shackle I'm using today here this soft shackle is rated to 14.5 ton minimum breaking strength now this shackle here is known as a four point seven five tonnes shackle now this is a piece of rigging equipment so it has to have a working load limit so the working load limit of this shackle is four point seven five ton now if you want to find the minimum breaking strength of this shackle you actually have to find out what the safety factor is now the safety factor on rigging equipment like this is usually five or six so to get the minimum breaking strength what you need to do is get four point seven five ton times a by five which is the minimum safety factor for a shackle like this in rigging equipment and then you end up with your minimum breaking strength so we end up at twenty three point seven ton now these shackles can usually take a lot more than that and if you guys want to check out a video of one actually getting pushed to its limits unsealed four times four did a really good video where they did a destruction test on a shackle like this and I'm pretty sure it didn't break until thirty two ton so I'll put a link in the description down below for that video so at the end of the day this is rated to 14.5 ton and in this video we're going to say this shackle is rated to twenty three point seven ton so which is stronger well it's this one alright now let's get into the pros and cons of both shackles okay one last thing that I didn't forget to mention is that soft shackles are just like both shackles they come in a variety of different sizes a lot of guys that are into styling actually use shackles soft shackles that are rated to one or two ton now then you have your recovery shackles for your forward driving 14.5 ton you can get them to be 20 ton or 30 ton even and it's the same with the bow shackle you by these four two-ton applications you can buy them for 55-ton applications now obviously not all of the sizes are going to fit through your recovery points but there is a stack of different sizes out there so you can get shackles soft shackles that are stronger than this one that I have today let's talk about some of the pros and cons of the soft shackles so these are incredibly lightweight which is the best thing about them if they go flying through the air in a recovery situation they might hurt you but they're definitely not going to kill you the other cool thing about them is they are very very simple to use you could almost teach a monkey to do that the other cool thing about them is that they since they are so lightweight they actually float so in a mud recovery or a river recovery anything like that chances of you losing one of these is pretty low now let's talk about the downfall of this soft shackle just like any other piece of recovery strap anything that's material in your recovery situation it's prone to wear and tear so virtually our cars forward drives have a lot of sharp objects on them on the tracks there's rocks and all sorts of things that these can rub up against so they are very very susceptible to damage so you do have to be quite careful with them now one thing that a lot of people are concerned about is the fact that when you use soft shackles on recovery points like mine here they do have quite sharp edges now the thing that a lot of people don't realize is that there's a really simple solution just don't use them use a bow shackle now a bow shackle you could rub this bow shackle all day long on this recovery point and it is not going to wear through not like a soft shackle so that is one of the biggest advantages of the bow shackle and the thing is as we've discussed these are rated to 23.7 ton so there is no way that this is going to be the first thing to fail in a recovery situation and this is the rate of recovery point so if this actually failed in a recovery situation there'd be a lot of questions asked about the company that made them so you're going to be pretty sure that the company that made this recovery point put a lot of R&D to make sure that it can survive recovery situations so using a bow shackle on a Rachael recovery point like this is absolutely no drama at all because there's nothing that can really go wrong as long as you put the pin in there's only one way it can go in it's not that hard so there you go guys first pro of the bow shackle another pro of the bow shackle is the price so I picked up this bow shackle from my local hardware shop on the way here [Music] 4.75 ton 12 bucks don't mind if I do so the average soft shackle for about the 14 ton range costs usually around $70 so for the same amount of money you could pretty much buy yourself five or six bow shackles so when it comes to price the bow shackle is a clear winner so what about the cons well if you have a few of these they kind of add up and they do weigh a fair bit when you're transporting them and that brings us to the biggest con if this goes flying through the air in a recovery situation if it doesn't hurt you it might kill you so they are very very dangerous if they go flying so now let's just go through a couple of different recovery situations to show where you should and shouldn't use a bow shackle now as we've already talked about there is absolutely nothing wrong with using a bow shackle on a rage to the recovery point like the one under my car now I have a single recovery point but if you have two recovery points on the front of your car it's very advisable to use an equalizer strap now all this strap is it's just a short little strap and all you got to do with this strap is get the end of your recovery snatch strap and just feed the strap through and then you can use two bow shackles to attach this to the two recovery points rated recovery points on the front of your four-wheel-drive vehicle and that way the load is spread in between the two points instead of just the one so it's a much safer way to do it so as far as both shackles go just use both shackles in a standard snatch off recovery there's no real point in using a soft shackle because if anything this shackle is weaker than the shackle under the car there so I'd much prefer use a bow shackle because there's more chance that it's going to hold the load when you compare it to something like this that is very susceptible to wear and tear so the reason that there's nothing wrong with using a bow shackle at the end of a snatch strap is the fact that the snatch strap is always going to be the weakest point it's never going to be the bow shackle the only other thing that could break is the recovery point but that's why we use a rated recovery points as we talked about earlier now the real danger starts when you need to attach to snatch straps together now in some situations one snatch strap won't be long enough to make sure that the recovery vehicle is well away from danger so you might need to join two straps together now right now I'm going to emphasize this I'm going to show you guys what you shouldn't do okay you should never ever ever ever do this okay so why is this wrong well we know that the shackles not going to break it's right into 23.7 ton but suddenly it's in between two of the weakest links the snatch straps because the recovery points on the vehicles if they're right or recovery points they're going nowhere the shackles on the vehicles are going nowhere because they're attached to rated recovery points but the snatch straps well they're the weakest link so suddenly if one of these straps decides to break this shackle could either go flying through the windscreen or the vehicle being recovered or through the back window of the recovery vehicle so this is very very dangerous and you should never do it ever now I'm going to show you guys how you can join two straps together safely by the way guys I forgot to mention another con of the bow shackle the fact that this can happen has anybody seen my pin it was right there a minute ago just don't know what happened to it yeah so you can quite easily lose the pin on the bow shackle ah and for that matter you can actually lose the whole thing because they do sink these don't sink anyway how do you attach to snatch straps together well all you have to do is get the eyelet of one and get the island of the other one and put it over now you need to get the other end of this snatch strap and just put it through here just pull in all the slack okay so it should end up looking something like that now the thing is is if you actually use the strap like this you will never ever get these straps apart when they bind together under the forces of a recovery situation so if you do manage to get them apart chances are you actually damage the straps so the best thing to do is to whack something in here that you can pull out later they often recommend a magazine but use whatever you've got in your car so in my case I've got this brush this brush is very lightweight if it goes flying it's not going to kill anyone and it'll be easier to get out afterwards and then that way when these straps bind you can just pull the brush out and then you can just use the slack that was created from the brush being there to actually wiggle the straps apart so never ever ever don't have anything in there because chances are you'll never get the straps apart so you'll always have a double extension snatch strap so this is really where the soft shackle comes into its own there is no way that you can use a bow shackle to join through snatch straps together while a soft shackle these things are so light that if it hits anyone it's not going to kill them so these are very very safe so if you ever need to join to recovery shops together you can use the method that I just showed you or you can just use a soft shackle and they're so easy to use and bam just like that we've joined two straps together safely so this is the only two ways that you should do it either with the thread through method or with a soft shackle as I've said never ever ever use a bow shackle to join to snatch straps together now I've mentioned a couple of times that if one of these hit you it's not going to kill you the thing is you shouldn't really have anybody anywhere near a recovery situation except for the driver of the recovery vehicle and the driver of the vehicle being recovered besides that everybody else should be way away from the recovery situation at least one and a half times the distance of the straps being used that's fairly safe so just remember that guys even nosies won't hurt if they hit you you still don't want to get hit in the first place - just keep all the bystanders well away from a recovery scenario alrighty well I showed you guys snatch strap scenarios now I was going to show you guys some winching scenarios but um there's no trees around here so let's go find some trees [Music] all right good news guys I've found a tree so I'm going to show you guys how to set up a winch virtually and we're going to talk about the different loads on all of the equipment and we're going to figure out where the weak points are because the thing is when it comes to rigging anything including your winch setups it's all about what the weakest link is because that's the thing that's going to break first all right guys I'm just going to show you guys how to rig up your tree strap so what you want to do is put it around the tree you want to choose a nice solid tree that isn't going to virtually get pulled over this one looks pretty solid ok now this is the incorrect way to do it this is called a choke hitch so you do not want to do a trick hitch because this actually lessens the amount the strap can actually handle so you virtually have the amount that the shrub can handle so this is a 12,000 kilograms strap it's only technically able to hold about 6,000 kilograms in this configuration ok so what we're going to do is we're just going to grab our bow shackle and put it through both of the loops on the strap put the pin in tighten it up and then half a turn backwards and I'm just going to pull up the tension because I want to talk to you guys about how much this strap can actually hold when it's set up like this now this is a 12,000 kilograms strap but what a lot of people don't realize is that when you loop the strap back on itself like this you actually multiplied the amount that the strap can handle and how much by well it virtually depends on the angle between the two legs of the strap so I'll put up a little chart in the video right now that shows what the angle is and what virtually the strap can handle extra but um as long as it's virtually under 45 degrees you've got 85% more strength in the strap so um I've just got this little app on my phone that allows me to measure angles so we're just going to see what the angle is here okay so right now it was 41 degrees so in between this leg of the strap and this leg of the strap there was 41 degrees so that's less than 45 degrees so we know that the strap is 85% stronger so I all we need to do is virtually get our calculator up okay so as you can see 12,000 kilograms times by 1.85 that's 85% there so we've got 22.2 tonnes so in this configuration as it is now this strap can now hold twenty two point two tonnes now as the angle increases if you're using a bigger tree you obviously can't put as much load on it as you can in this configuration so if you're in between say forty-five to sixty degrees this strap is only 73% stronger now I'll put up a little chart in his video so you can see as the angle gets more you got less and less capacity but in this situation here we got twenty two point two tonnes just using simple mass calculation you can figure it out now you may be wondering why is that so well because the load is now shared between the two pieces of the strap so this is taking half of the load and this is taking half of the load so that's why this strap can now handle more and remember guys don't forget your winch dampener okay so this recovery setup is all good to go so let's talk about what the strongest point of this recovery is down to the weakest piece of equipment so as I've already discussed the bow shackle that's rated to 23.7 tonne the next thing as we already discussed is the strap which is now rated to twenty two point two tonne in that bear configuration that we have around that tree now what's the next thing that's the weakest well it's this rope here so this rope is rated to 8,000 kilograms so that's the next weakest link so in this recovery setup right here what is the first thing that is going to break well it's actually the winch so in the car there I've got a 12,000 pound winch installed so when you convert that to kilograms it's roughly 5.5 tonne so 5,500 kilograms that it can pull now you got to remember that's on the first roll because every additional roll of cable on the winch makes it weaker and weaker so right now I definitely would not be getting 5.5 tonne of pulling because there's at least two-thirds of the roll still on the winch but even so the fact still remains that the winch is the weakest point so virtually right now the first thing that would break assuming that this rope is in good condition is the winch the winch would stall the winch would say not sorry mate this is just too hard I'm giving up I can't do this anymore and virtually that's all that would happen now if the winch somehow got superhuman power and decided it could pull more the next thing to break after that would be the rope but even so the shackle and the tree strap is perfectly safe there is no way that's coming undone so let's switch it out now for a soft shackle [Music] [Music] okay guys exactly the same scenario same setup only we've changed the shackle for a soft shackle so what's the strongest point this time well instead of it being the shackle this time it's actually the strap the strap is the strongest point of this whole setup at twenty-two point two tons now the next thing that's going to break is the soft shackle fourteen point five tonnes after that we've got the winch rope at eight tonne and then last thing of course is the winch of five point five tonnes that's when it's going to stall so has replacing the shackle the bow shackle for a soft shackle made this recovery any safer well not really I mean if the shackles had a fair bit of wear and tear it could actually give prematurely before anything else so personally and this kind of winching setup I'd rather use a bow shackle every time because I know that it's not going anywhere because they're virtually bulletproof now let's set up another winch recovery and go through that look at the color coordination going on here what we have here now is a two-to-one pulley system how do you know it's a two-to-one pulley system well if I round in one meter of rope the car would only move forward half a meter so let's go through this setup again and talk about the strongest points and the weakest points what's going to break first in this scenario right here now as usual the bow shackle is the strongest point twenty three point seven tonnes after that we've got this tree strapped at twenty two point two tonnes what's next after that well this snatch block right here has a working load of eight ton but it's got a minimum breaking strain of sixteen ton so that's the next strongest thing now what do we have after that well this winter up was eight tonne before but because there's two pieces of rope going back to the car the load is half din between the rope so now instead of only been able to handle eight ton this rope when you combine it can now hold 16-ton and what's the last thing it's the winch once again so the winch is going to stall now instead of at five point five it's going to stall at eleven ton so that's virtually this whole setup the weakest link again is the winch and after that we've got the winch rope now you might be wondering what about the recovery point under the car well that recovery point under the car is rated for 8,000 kilograms eight ton but seeing as it only has to handle half of the load of this whole setup there is no way that it's going to break before the winch stalls so you don't really have to worry about it okay so now let's change it over to a soft shackle and see about that same scenario except now we have a soft shackle here so let's run through this again the strongest point of this recovery setup is now the tree strap rated at twenty two point two tonnes after that it's this snatch block rated at sixteen tons then we have the rope also at sixteen and then we have the shackle at fourteen point five and then we have the winch at eleven tonne so has putting this soft shackle here made this recovery any safer well not really because now it's the second weakest link of this whole setup and if this soft shackle had a bit of wear and tear and it wasn't holding its full capacity it could actually let go and then this snatch block would go flying that way which is very very dangerous so personally in this situation here I'd actually prefer to use a bow shackle as well because he just nodes bulletproof and then the weakest link is actually the rope and the winch which is personally what I prefer as opposed to this snatch block going flying so it goes with anything though guys like we talked about earlier make sure your gear is in good condition because if it's not in good condition this could break before the winch stalls which is dangerous again so it's all about maintenance and making sure all your gear is in good condition there's actually quite a few people that don't think that this is a two-to-one pulley system I've seen it all over forums and stuff so the way you know it's a true - one pulley system as I mentioned before is that the car will actually only move half of what the winch pulls in so I'm just going to try it I'm going to measure one meter and we're going to see how far the cars moved forward and I'll put this stick here so we know where the tile is on the ground before all right let's pull it in one meter okay so now that it's tension that's one made up [Music] so there is no doubt about it the car only moved 1/2 meter forward from where the tire starts touching the ground and I poured in 1 meter of winch rope so it is definitely a two-to-one pulley system there's just one last thing that I want to talk about as far as winching is concerned that not everybody realizes so if you want to use your winches full potential you virtually have to take all of the cable off except for the last layer of cable that's where you're going to get your full pulling power so in this video today we talked about the winch stalling at 5.5 tons to get to that level you have to have all of the cable off except for the last layer because what happens as each layer gets rolled onto the drum the winch loses more and more power so what that means virtually is if you're stuck and there's a tree that's closed if you're really stuck the better thing to do is to go to the tree that's a bit further away that your winch rope can still reach to because that means your winch is going to have more power because you would have used that more winch cable and there's less on the drum because as you can imagine as more and more cable gets pulled onto the drum the ratio of the pulley actually changes which is why the winch loses power so there's my final little tip for you guys if you're really really stuck just maybe try putting it pulling out a bit more cable it might give you more power and help you get out of the situation that you're in to summarize soft shackle versus bow shackle which one's better will they both have their advantages and their disadvantages you can't beat a soft shackle when it comes to joining to snatch straps together and you can't beat a bow shackle when it comes to how hearty and durable they are so I'm going to be keeping both in my recovery tool kit they're both handy for different situations another thing guys make sure your recovery straps and gear is in good condition it's very important I know I mentioned it a few times in this video but it is quite important besides that get out there and enjoy the awesome forward driving that we have in this country I hope you guys learned something in this video and thanks for watching we'll see you guys in the next one catch you later 14.5 ton after that hanging I've stuffed up seek adventure

Channel: Seek Adventure

Views: 657,666

Keywords: Soft Shackle, Bow Shackle, Steel Shackle, 4x4 recovery

Id: kW304fXuG1M

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019