Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game PSA Stuck Truck Dangers

Everyone who has ever driven off pavement and ended up stuck, which likely is 99% of folks reading this, absolutely needs to watch the video below.

It goes into the dangers of the forces of pulling out stuck trucks like many of us drive.

Watching this video sent a chill down my spine as I have done exactly what this unfortunate man did, using a cheap Chinese type tow strap (I bought mine at Tractor Supply because it was cheap :hammer:) looped over a ball hitch and hit the gas pedal to pull a truck out.

After my wife sent me this video, I started going down the rabbit hole of the forces at work and the load numbers on the equipment are surprisingly high, especially when pulling out the diesel 3/4 and 1 ton pickups. A diesel pickup with a load of feed/corn, ice chests, fuel, and people can easily weigh 10,000 - 12,000 on up to 15,000 pounds, if really loaded up. Stuck in the mud doubles that number to over 20,000# pounds of force needed to pull it out. Add a heavy load in the bed and/or a trailer and the numbers can jump to 30,000+ pounds. I have pulled out a F250 that had the bed loaded and towing a trailer full of feed stuck in the mud with a cheap Chinese tow strap on the ball hitch. Looking back, I got lucky.

Here is a good website with some very basic introductory type tutorials. They also offer an app for phones for $10 that will help calculate load forces and thus help the stuck person figure out what type and rating of equipment is needed to do the job safely..

https://www.safe-xtract.com

Yes, I am still alive after doing it the half-assed full redneck way, but after reading this story and digging into it, this type of bad outcome is more common than we might think.

One of my relatives manufactures heavy duty axles for the off-road crowd. He has seen tow and winch lines break three times, one of the times cutting off a person's leg as he watched from afar.

Guys, this is a danger we can very easily minimize with a small bit of time and effort to inform ourselves. Please do yourself a favor and spend just a bit of time looking into and buying the proper equipment.

Another point - many believe that putting a "dampener" or "winch blanket" over a line will make it safe. There are some excellent videos on YouTube testing these devices and they do absolutely nothing - zero - to slow down a broken winch or tow line. They have absolutely no effect, so do not lull yourself into thinking that using one will save you, it won't.

Is this type of gear overkill? I think about my relative watching as a person's leg was cut off by a line breaking or that image below with a tow hitch through the windshield. That could be any of us.

A bit too much safety factor in equipment is better than coming up just a wee bit too short and having a catastrophic failure. Say you spend $500 to $1000, that is less than the deductible on the ER visit and a doc is not going to sew a leg back on or put a bandaid over a trailer hitch in the head. The gear will last many, many years and is something that if needed, needs to work right - and safely.

Hope that helps someone. Please watch this video.

A trailer ball is a high risk hook point.
Some years ago here, a guy put a trailer behind his car and went up in the hills to cut firewood. When he was full, he tried to cross a small creek and buried it. A guy with a pickup had a recovery strap and tried to help pull him out. He tied the strap to a tow hook on the front of his pickup but there was nothing to hook to on the car so they wrapped it around the front bumper. When he hit the end of the strap, it pulled the bumper clear off the car and threw it through the pickup windshield, killing the driver.

He said that a grade 8 bolt isn't as strong as a 5/8" hitch pin. Etrailer.com says that a grade 8 bolt has a shear strength of 90k, the same as a 5/8 hitch pin. However, it's harder and more likely to break as it won't flex like a real hitch pin. It will also be more likely to egg out the pin hole in the hitch.

Yep, there is a lot of conflicting information out there and lots of calculations that in reality in field conditions are far less than precise. After digging through online technical writings some patterns seem consistent and some are inconsistent.

Are there any differences in the quality of pins? Are there any higher rated hitch pins? So far, none seem to have ratings that I can find, so I wonder if they all are from the same Chinese factory, just some are shinier than others.

People have been known to hook a tow strap to the loops for the safety chains. Have you looked at most of those? They're pathetically weak. I don't know how they hold a trailer that comes unhitched. The strongest way is to get that soft clevis around the hitch cross bar although that isn't always possible and it might expose the fabric to a sharp edge.

Some pintle hooks use a trailer ball so a regular ball hitch trailer can be towed. That takes you back to the strength of the ball which is part of the original problem.

We came across a tree that fell across the road. No saw, so I shot through it with the M1 Garand, then tied the winch cable to it to break it in 2. Putting a coat or some dampener on the cable will save the snap back into the vehicle...

RC,

what do you think about this? 36,000# rating per etrailer.com, but it says 40 tons on the face of it. Forged as one piece.


https://www.etrailer.com/Pintle-Hitch/Brophy/BR27FR.html

One of the things that really bothers me about this incident is that it appears that there was no attempt made to dig the vehicle out to reduce the suction and resistance of the mud. That is the very first thing I would have done.
The presenter is probably correct about all of the equipment and its engineering limitations but no one seems to have made the initial effort.

Bad things happen and I'm glad it wasn't me.

that one should do the job. It's that trailer ball setup that has it's weak point. It's made for towing a trailer of a given weight, not for heavy duty winching.

So much comes down to the hitch pin. No matter how big and strong the hitch, pintle, or the ball mount is, the pin is the go-between. Those things are amazingly strong for their size.

It's dangerous to put a strap on a tow ball to snatch with, but you won't shear a trailer ball off by doing so. I've bent hitches, truck frames, stretched chains so tight the links can't swivel. A diesel truck with a 15k lb Warn wench and a snatch block can pull about anything out.
My condolences to the family that really sucks.

Wow. I bet he saw it coming to.

Might have had time to blink. Good video…I’ve made some of those mistakes but got lucky.

I’ve seen a 3” nylon hawser part and it was spectacular. Fortunately all the line handlers got away when the line started “singing”. Sounded like a rifle when it let go.

Shrapnel,

very creative way to remove a log.

Coats, winch blankets, and dampeners in general appear to do little to nothing.

This video seems well done and informative.

Hmmm. Ford 9000, Prentice Loader, empty one way/loaded the other.

All drives chained with mud chains,
axle deep in mud, or too steep/muddy to climb/decend.
Hooked to a big dam cable skidder and drug.


Might have been around a Big Hook a couple times when setting up a wreck. Wanna talk about forces and cable tension that makes your
nuts crawl up inside?


Forces with a pickup!😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂


Anyone getting hurt is no joke.

Guys obsessed with their "BIG DIESEL" aren't just hilarious, many are
pathetic.

Synthetics stretch quite a bit. Synthetic line snap back is very real. https://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/

Digging around found this hitch.

Anyone have a better suggestion for pulling out 3/4 and 1 ton pickups, maybe with a trailer attached?

https://www.etrailer.com/p-ED25SHACKLE.html

A chain won’t snap back when broken, but winches only use wire rope or synthetic cable which will snap back.

Back in the 1980’s or 90’s at Fort Carson Army base a tank broke down while “down range “.

A crew of soldiers went down to recover it. They set up to winch it onto a (low boy???) trailer. It was bitching cold so the whole crew sat in the truck cab while winching, in violation of the rules.

The cable snapped, cut off the top of truck, along with the heads of everybody in the cab.

Sturdy! What do you think would be the first thing to break on a truck pulling on this?

Wow, very tragic story DD. Sad that it could have been so easily avoided.

To your question, guessing the attachment/recovery point on the stuck vehicle probably will be the weakest link by the time I put my package together.

Digging into the subject, my conclusion is recoveries are just dangerous no matter what is used and any of the equipment can fail. The heavier the vehicle, the more the dangers increase. It appears dangers can be reduced, but never eliminated.

Even chains can snap and recoil too. See this video beginning at 3:58. 10’ of chain go through the rear window.

Whoa! That did snap back!

For those using winches and think a winch blanket or dampener will make things safe, what this video of testing. The dampeners do little to nothing.

And the rear window was only about 2 feet above the license plate that said Tennessee on it...

Many years ago my cousin (spends a lot of time in the swamps) always had a truck with a PTO winch. As long as the motor runs…..you got winch. Quite often he was called in from a hunt to pull someone out.

One time someone at camp had a “hopped-up”, lifted Jeep who managed to burry it real good! Roy was called, arrived and surveyed the scene, and had someone tie onto the front of the Jeep frame. With his initial pull, it started dragging his F 250 toward the Jeep. So they chained the rear of the Ford to a tree and “gave her hell”! The Jeep finally pulled free…..well some of it did. Apparently part of the Jeep frame hung up on an unseen stump in the mud. If I remember correctly, the Jeep separated somewhere around the transmission!

I guess you can only “stretch” a Jeep so far….before something gives! 😁 memtb

that's the problem with chain - it has no give at all. If you have to jerk it, you're multiplying the force on the chain many times over. A chain has to be rated many times over what you're pulling with it. Most of the tow chains I've seen on the market are for pulling a car down a flat road, NOT for getting it unstuck. That little chain in the video is nowhere near heavy enough to be jerking that Jeep out of mud.

Weight over a strap, cable, or chain absolutely will slow it down in the event of a break. Attempting to accelerate even a small amount of mass bleeds off energy rapidly. Depends on the weight of the chain/strap/cable vs the weight being used to how effective it is.

There are better methods than tied off to the ball hitch, but the ball is pretty strong. A shackle with a grade 8 pin or bolt is better.

Some good information and some misinformation in the OP's video. The presenter brought up some good issues about working loads, loads limits, etc.; however, confused tensile, shear, and bending strength (moment capacity) repeatedly. It appears the hitch in the towing accident broke due to bending or better said, it was a moment failure. The dropped hitch acted like a lever arm and bent, to the point of catastrophic failure, the hitch. The steel was clearly brittle, and should not have been. That appears to be a manufacturer defect. Properly designed structural steel should yield (i.e. bend) before it breaks. Considering it was near the gusset weld, heat might have brittle hardened the steel.

Shear strength is what the hitch pin feels, double shear strength actually, as in two shear planes. Very few factors determine the load capacity: diameter of pin, Fy or yield strength of the steel, usually somewhere between 45-125ksi, thickness of the hitch and receiver steel, and yield strength of hitch and receiver steel. That's it. According to one engineering manual a 5/8" shear pin with mid range steel would be good for 34,000lbs, working load. The shear strength of a 1" bolt, e.g. at the bottom of a 2 5/16" ball is about 44,000 lbs working load. That presenter was not even close when he mentioned the bolt at the base of the ball was a weak link. Keeping a tow strap on a ball is a major safety issue in my opinion.

Tensile strength of steel is what it will break at in tension. Very simply a factor of its cross sectional area and steel strength. For example 1 square inch of 45ksi steel will yield at 45,000lbs - not including safety factors. Even a hollow tube 2" type hitch has a cross sectional area greater than 1 square inch.

In general, a 2 5/16" hitch will handle just about anything you can throw at it assuming the loads are all linear or horizontal. Once moments, angled pulls, and to some degree jerking loads are added to it, all bets are off.

His advice to use a shackle mount hitch is good. It's designed to keep the loads linear with no minimal bending loads and the tow rope cannot fall off the ball.

Not to mention that the link that breaks can fly "somewhere" at bullet velocity.

Thank you for posting, some great information in that video.

I would add that anything manufactured in chiner is a no go. chiner-made steel is an amalgamation of many different types of scrap and is almost guaranteed to fail. Look at all the bridge failures that have used chiner steel. Look at the problems welding chiner steel. I read an article not to long ago that chiner-made shackles were failing at an alarming rate resulting in deaths and many near misses. Ever tried to sharpen a chiner-made axe or hatchet? - a file will skate across parts of the edge and 'bite" in other parts - inconsistent metalurgy and inconsistent tempering. Avoid chiner steel at all costs. Make sure that all your recovery gear is USA made. Sure, USA manufactured recovery gear is more expensive, but anything less is a risk I'm not willing to take. AND AVOID HORROR FREIGHT GEAR AT ALL COSTS!

Not true. Not even close.

In the information age i find it mind boggling how anybody would use a chain on a ball hitch for any recovery.