Importance of safety rope for harder tow rope tugs

[Gaurav]

We have been using and recommending securing the tow rope for harder tug always, recently I got to experience its real importance.

In Liwa across soft sand patch, when we have to pull a dead car, where we have to have a slightly higher rolling momentum to release the car from soft sand and yet continue rolling. During that time, the stock tow point failed and the safety rope absorbed the potential trajectory and hit the tow point back into the sand. No damage was caused to Raptor (towing vehicle) or any human around.

Here are the pics of the climber shackle rated for 200 kg and the safety rope rated for 500 kg.

 

 

[Gaurav]

Frame-by-frame coverage

[Mike M.]

Hi @Gaurav thanks for sharing. How would you further secure a tow rope? I know this comes across as a basic/naive question for the more seasoned drivers especially for crew/leads/support team members but you never know when a sip from the fountain of knowledge might come handy in critical situations. 

[Gaurav]

Hi Mike, there is no real need of securing tow rope further, as we secure 3 things together with safety rope (Tow rope, shackle and tow point). The whole idea is, if any of these three things fail, safety rope "supposed" to absorb the kinetic energy and redirect the remaining force downward. In other words, to slow down the projectile force from 100 km/hr speed to 10 km/hr (its an example).

The core reason we want support rope or climber shackle to fail too in that process so that alternate point where we secure safety rope (lower arm, foot rest, swaybar, steering rod, etc) shouldn't break.

If you meant to secure the failing tow rope even more, then I would recommend using the sand filled winch damper along with safety rope, but that's really an overkill. You can use this overkill setup when you need to give jolting tug to stuck vehicle, but not while towing a dead car, as winch damper will interfere in dead car recovery.