No tow points!?!

Our success was buying graded chain , forged not cast hooks and nylon straps from a CDN company that makes crane and hoisting fittings . Having some idea of loads and always going a size or two up was never wrong . In the decade I spent driving a tow truck we never broke a chain , strap or cable . We did destroy a winch , but nobody lost a finger .


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Used to do a lot of work with tensioned cables, and sometimes shifting them involved pulling them with other cables and winches, which sometimes broke. We always used cable damper saddles with about 5 lbs of sand, set past the halfway point closer to the far end of the winch cable. The longer the cable, the more dampers you add. Made a big difference if the cable let go (9 times out of 10 at the far connection point), often just dropping to the ground, no drama.

If you want to see a real bang, watch a 0.6" dia. post-tensioned cable let go. Over 46000 lbs of force released through a cable stretched like a rubber band. Will shoot over a hundred feet in the right circumstances, or straight through sheet steel or post shores. Or wrap itself around a lawyer's corner office in a downtown highrise about half a dozen times, destroying an antique desk and sending legal documents everywhere. Don't ask me how I know...
 
Steel cables may be the most dangerous when they let go , think bullwhip with the power to cut through a car . Many off-roaders are looking to the new dyneema and synthetic cables to save weight . They are UV sensitive and have about an eight yr life in northern hemispheres . Long answer , think it through and if it looks sketchy , it probably is .


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