Winch on Mount Hitch

Hi back at you. I'm out of Issy. You're points below are spot on. 4:1 off an ATV winch - Classic. That's a lot of knitting but it's certainly capable of providing good extraction loads.

 

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that if it’s well stuck, it takes more pulling power than the weight of the vehicle. How much depends on how badly it’s stuck.

Your 8000 # winch may not move your 3000# vehicle.

We had a Ford pickup with both front wheels stuck in a ditch. If we had tried to use just the winch (and heaven forbid stretchy straps weren’t common then) we’d have left the front end stuck in the ditch.

We ended up digging out the front bumper enough to get a hi lift under it. You’d be surprised how low you can get those things.

we then jacked it to its max height (for the fearful, yes it was tippy). In the end no winch was needed. The truck just backed up. The jack tipped and the front wheels were out of the ditch.

The point of this tale is, don’t just grab the cable and yank. Force is all well and good. But often finesse is better.

 

Seems some people just can not understand almost every recovery is different and needs some forethought before doing anything .

Like I think we need the twin 60 Ton winch Truck to do this correct.

 

We should probably stop trying to extract submarines from gumbo. If you can raise the truck you don't need more winch. Instead of the jib used in this video, set a hi-lift jack on a recovery board and run the line through a change of direction at the top. If no one has a farm jack, a 3 ft long sturdy log that is 12 inches square in cross section (aka. the size of a 4x4 piece of lumber) vertically supports more than 15,000 lbs. Up then over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZjqEC_FWqo


That's not my video. I was going to also do that in the ATV winch video but since it's relevant now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. These are just bastardizations of high angle and confined space rescue concepts.

I suspect most people who do 4:1's for vehicle recovery use the spanish burton (see below), which is easy to learn and build, doesn't require a double sheave pulley, and is quick to set up. There are other ways to do it, which have advantages such as not needing multiple recovery points on the vehicle, or can be rigged at home then collapsed and stored in a bag, just depending on what's important.

 

As several have mentioned, the most important extraction tool is your brain. The second is patients, third being experience.

After those you finally get to the hardware. But with those with the first three you can often do more with much less than someone with the best hardware alone.