In our attempts to learn about off-road winching, we attended lots of club meetings, competitions and off-road shows and watched and listened to all the so called experts. They all talked with great authority and in some length about their safe winching practices and a little of what they said did make some sense. However, it was clear that priorities were all wrong and in my view, very few of these people had actually considered what they were trying to achieve, in teaching safe winching techniques.

The two most important safety practices being taught were:-
1. Gloves should always be used, (or lots of points were docked from competition scores).
2. A blanket should be placed over the wire rope, so that if the wire rope breaks the blanket will act as a parachute.

We would like to illustrate that there is a serious problem with these points being considered of "paramount importance".
1. If gloves are not used, the winch operator may cut his hand slightly, but only if the cable is damaged. A relatively small potential injury compared with what I will describe later.
2. Placing a blanket over the wire rope, implies that the wire rope may break and that one should prepare for this, rather than prevent it. Also this blanket has to be constantly moved during the winching process and, in all of the cases I have seen, this is done with the cable under heavy load, thus placing that person in a very perilous position. I guess he just has his fingers crossed, hoping the cable won't break at that precise point in time.

Surely the following safety factors are of far more importance:-

1. The strength of the wire rope should always comfortably exceed the maximum stall rating of the winch. Many manufacturers seem to ignore this fact, for example, the new Superwinch-Goodwinch G10 which has a claimed stall rating of 12,000lb, but until recently (before we told them about this) it was fitted with a 9mm wire rope with a 11,400lb breaking strain, which means that it is almost sure to break. Personally I cannot think of many things more dangerous than a winch cable snapping under heavy load, with or without a "parachute".
2. Drive-assisting a winch (commonly practiced in the UK) is dangerous. This is where the vehicle's driving wheels are used to assist the winch. So the winch is pulling at one speed and the wheels, just when the bite, are driving at another, causing a frequent and often violent snatching action on the cable, where the static loading may already be a couple of tonnes. What then is the resultant compound impact load on this wire rope? Then also take into account the effect of a spaghetti-like tangle of cable, producing jamming overlaps and strand breaking kinks. You have another cable-snapping situation just waiting to happen.

Up until the arrival of Alfred Murray Ltd on the scene, nearly all the winches used here were electric and it was clear that all these so called "safety rules" and slick winching techniques were designed to make the best of their products otherwise pathetic performance. They had to invent "drive-assist winching" because the winch couldn't make it on its own. After all this is a practice used no where else, the Industrial Health and Safety Officer sees to that. They had to use pulleys to save the winch from overheating and the battery going flat. Worse of all there is such a wide discrepancy between an electric winch's stall rating and it's useful pulling capacity that the wire rope had to be kept thin, in order for it to be long as possible.

Now this may seem like sour grapes from an apparently "velocity challenged" winch supplier, but just for a moment think about real safety ...........

Winch Racing. .Another dubious winching practice employed, especially in the UK, is where both the rigging and winching is all carried out against the clock "Line speed is everything" a new winch is launched and it is even faster than ever...... vvvrrrooommm. In my opinion this is just dangerous macho bullshit. The reason electric winches are fast is because the motors are inherently fast and it costs efficiency to slow them down. Motor torque is extremely low compared to a hydraulic motor and so it's "get the winching over quickly, before the whole thing goes up in smoke". This, at best, makes any sort of winching unnecessarily difficult and at worst just plain dangerous.

I had already used my hydraulic winch many times, when I first tried to use an electric winch. First a Superwinch X9 and later a Warn 8274 and I can tell you electric winches are such hard work. You need every trick in the book to make them work, in fact I have to admire what some guys manage to get out of them. But then you can't hear what is going on because the winch is so noisy and you have to rev the hell out of the engine too, to stop the battery from going flat. In comparison to a hydraulic winch (any hydraulic winch), this experience is verging on chaos and very disconcerting for the newcomer. Pretty damn smelly as well with the hot electrics, toxic battery and exhaust fumes.

The vehicle-mounted winch industry world-wide remains almost completely unregulated, with no mandatory safe working margins applied to any of the equipment used and this industry is currently lead by a bunch of die-hard, ill-advised "experts. So where do we go from here?......Allan Byrne