Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris In Milwaukee
We all have to start somewhere. Let's use this as a learning experience.
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Fair enough. Instead of criticism maybe some pointers would help.
The cost of one rotopax would have paid for a high lift jack. He could have used the jack to lift up the slider on either side and put some rocks under the tires. He also could have used a high lift on the rear hitch and lifted up the rear to put some rocks under the rear tires.
Traction pads are mostly worthless in my experience, but they could have possibly been used here to make a nice jack base. The spare tire is also often a useful base to jack from in soft sand. And in a pinch it works to dig a hole, bury the spare tire, and then winch from the buried spare tire. This is very common in deep snow off roading. Usually you would use the handle from your high lift jack behind the spare to attach your winch cable to through the center hole.
Like this:
The same could have been done with the bottle jack he has in the back. He's got one arm in a sling, but the bottle jack doesn't take much skill to use and should be operable one armed. Lift up the tires. Put something firm under them.
His first choice though should have been the winch. So it would be useful to learn how to use a winch and how to put a new brummel eye in it. I posted a video above. Doing this one handed would be kinda challenging. He should have had his kid help.
Also he should have had a tow strap. I'd bet that the winch rope was looped back onto its self and the rope broke because of that, or he wrapped the winch rope around a rock and it cut it on a sharp corner. He should have used either a tow strap or a tree strap to wrap around the rock and then hooked the winch rope to that. You don't need an expensive recovery strap. A typical $30 strap will work just fine.
Or in the alternative if you didn't have any thicker strap like that, the next best thing to do would be to use either a thick coat (carhart style) or the floor mats to protect the winch rope on the back side of the rock so that it doesn't get cut by the rock sharp edges. Putting synthetic plastic rope on sharp edges and pulling is a recipe for cutting the rope.
Between the winch and jack, this should be a non-issue to get free from.
Finally - get rid of that hitch rack. Even if he did manage to get over that log - he would have come down in the rear on the hitch rack and probably either bent the rear frame cross member or collapsed the hitch rack. Put that shit on top or in the back or leave it behind. Hitch racks like that are a major liability off road.