Some of you may or may not remember my little capstan winch brainfart idea. I said then that synthetic line was going to change winching in more ways than one and thought up a possible plausible scenario.
A year or 2 ago I had to winch a county-leased ditch witch that weighed roughly 7K lbs out. Not only was it stuck but it was buried in a remote easement. It had been raining forever, the DW was at the bottom of a muddy hill that was too far for me to winch. I had to drive down the hill, winch it out of the hole, turn it around, winch myself part way up the hill, turn around and winch it part way up, winch myself to the top and then turn around and winch it up. Each time I had to tie the rear of the truck off to a tree and, at the top, the bottom of a power distribution line pole. I had wire rope on at the time, not sythetic.
So, all this talk about winches again and it's going to start getting muddy around here again and sometimes we get stuff stuck that is bigger than my truck and I got to thinking. If I had synthetic line when I was winching the DW out, I could have had a 250' rope and used my winch like a capstan style winch. I could have strapped off my truck to the bottom of the pole and then ran several rounds of line around the winch drum and let the free end fall to the ground. Snatch block it on the DW and had a much easier time of pulling him out. Instead of having to go to him I could have pulled from afar. Yeah I could have used my extension line too!
But what about longer runs of synthetic line in other situations. Having a long line, 3 or 4 snatch blocks and some straps and a little jeep would be able to easily retrieve us, if his frame would hold together and there was something he could tie off to. Not to memtion you are pulling at maximum pull during the entire pull since the line is not spooling up on the winch drum.
One could go around with a longer line in their kit and easily unspool their regular line and use this setup should the need arise. I think.
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