Winch Damper Video

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macr88

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Hello, thought I would share the usefulness or lack thereof of a winch damper video that I came across shortly after purchasing my winch dampers for recovery situations. I did return them after watching this video though.
Let me know what you guys think? Should I have kept them?

 

Homeguy

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I would like to see a snatch strap go through that. Would be interesting. I think all he used were tow straps.


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caleath

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I think you plan for the worst..best to keep live stuff away from things that can kill it.

I would like to see winch cable tested like that
 

Anak

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I don't know about adding a dense weight to the line.

This is a jacket on a steel winch line:


(First time trying to post a video here--Cool. Looks like it works.)
 
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macr88

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The hardware at the end of the line would've landed in the same place with or without the jacket.

The force at which it let go was relatively small compared to a cable snapping.


-mac
 

JPaul

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In that first video were they testing their own attempts at making a self restraining strap? I've never seen any of those versions they were trying, but they all had a fundamental flaw in that they assumed it would only break at the end. You'd need to have a second slightly longer strap running the whole way with tethers sewn every 5 feet or so between the two straps to capture the broken ends no matter where they are at in the main pulling strap. But that still won't help if it's not the strap that breaks but one of the recovery points, they'll still take the entire thing with them.

You'd need to have the second strap hooked to a different location, even if it's just hooked to the frame or axle or something. And the second strap should have a low breaking point so that if either vehicle takes out all the slack in the second line and breaks that strap as well it won't inflict much if any damage.

But that's going to make a pricey strap, I'd imagine it'd at least double the price if not more, so probably the only people that'd buy it are the extremely cautious ones and they're probably not going to break a strap anyway by being careless.

I have thought though that having restraining straps on each end that hook to the recovery points or strap end and to another point on the vehicle would probably work for restraining the recovery point in case it detaches from the frame. Then if the recovery point somehow detaches from the frame the restraining strap will catch it and at the least slow it down significantly. It's additional setup but you can use a couple cheaper short straps for this.

Of course this would only work on recovery points that are looks like D-Link or similar.

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Veggie Man

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I have looked around a bit after coming across this thread and have only found one video that shows a little bit of anything useful. I cannot say for certain that winch line dampers work. All of the interwebs say it is true so it must be...

Here is the one video I found: