Recovery with a winch

First of all, here's my set-up:
2013 Tacoma, All-Pro Apex Aluminum front bumper, Warn Zeon 10s winch with Factor5 Pro Link.

Now, here's my question. Say I need to use a snatch block and double back the winch line to my bumper. How should I hook up the winch line to my bumper? The Pro Link is designed to accept a D-Ring and so is my bumper. I've read that it's not a good idea to hook two D-Rings together. What do you guys recommend?

Thanks in advance!

Matt

 

It mostly has to do with limiting possible failure points. If the bow sections of the shackles are connected together with a pin connecting to the bumper and a pin connecting to the winch line then the tension should cause them to center on each other. Shackles are designed to be the strongest and achieve their working load limit when the direction of pull is straight through the shackle.

You could use a strap or a soft shackle to couple them together, but you're adding yet another point of possible failure. The best solution would be to rig a bridle between you're two front recovery points and equalize the stress on the points and the frame. With the bridle even an off center pull will have the stress almost equalized with the bridle.

It sounds like that would add more possible failure points, but you have to decide if the benefits of a bridle outweigh the costs.

 

That makes sense. I hope I never get stuck so bad that any of my gear gets stressed to it's breaking point, but you never know! Thank you for your input. I appreciate it.

Matt

 

Pushing recovery gear to the breaking point can usually be avoided with the application of a little gray matter and a shovel.

If you want a bridle for winching and kinetic recovery the simplest solution would be a long tree saver strap. ARB makes a 16ft tree saver strap that would work. Connect the eyes to each recovery point and use the pro link and a shackle to connect the winch to the middle. The shackle will slide along the length of the tree saver and self equalize. For a kinetic recovery feed the bridle strap through the eye of the kinetic strap before connecting to the second recovery point. This avoids using an unnecessary shackle in a kinetic recovery.

For either use you should try to lay everything out with the bridle already as close to equalized as you can guesstimate it. When selecting a bridle strap find one long enough that the angle the strap forms between the two recovery points is at most 30 degrees, preferably less. If you go too short and make the angle too great then the bridle will actually be pulling the recovery points toward each other and negate the whole reason for using a bridle, which is to minimize and equalize stress on the vehicle's frame.