www.4×4tec.co.za

CLEANING

After the heavy rains of June 2011, there were quite a few major recovery operations my friends and I had to deal with. Most of the recoveries were in mud and that makes recovery equipment very dirty which is very bad for them, especially for snatch straps and ropes.

After one of the recovery operations, I had to clean the recovery equipment. I snapped a few photo’s with my phone as I was busy and thought I’d share it with everyone.

As you can see here, the ropes/straps end up in a filthy state after some serious mud work, that rope is suppose to be white!

Dirty Rope

Dirty Strap

Firstly I attach the strap or rope to a tree in my front garden and my bakkie. The I pull it tight with the bakkie, suspending the full length of the rope/strap off the ground.

Then I blast it with my Karcher, first one side, then the other side. The high pressure cleaner does a great job as you can see in the pics below…maybe I should put some effort into cleaning my paving as well, but I’ll leave that for the summer when everything is drier.

Here’s everything after the high pressure cleaning. The closest barrel is all the snatch straps and ropes, and those will go onto the next stage of washing. Keeping snatch straps and ropes squeeky clean is very important as the dirt damages the fibres during the snatching operation. The other barrel contains all the static tow straps and those only get cleaned with the high pressure washer, mostly because they are too hard for the washing machine and will cause damage to the machine.

Next, the snatch ropes/strap go into the washing machine. Some say you should put it in an orange bag, i.e. the perforated bag oranges come in, but I feel the loose rope gets cleaner and you don’t end up with an unbalanced load during the spin cycle.

After all of this the straps and ropes go onto the washing line. Hanging them straight in the sun is also not good for them, so I rig up a ratched strap under my braai area roof and hang everything there for a day or three to dry out before packing it away for the next recovery operation.

INSPECTION

During the cleaning process, also properly inspect the ropes/straps and doing this while they are under tension, works well. Here you can see a strap that is on it’s way out. It’s only a few broked fibres and a slightly narrowed area, but this strap is now at the end of it’s life.

More strap damages cause by a sharp part on a vehicle chassis.

This strap was used as a safety strap during a recovery. The bridle broke and this strap caught the snatch rope, but as the rope was under huge tention, the strap pulled tight and slid along the rope, melting the strap. The strap had to be cut off the rope.

This is a clear and catastrophic failure of a piece of recovery equipment, an 8ton rated, 3 metre long bridle. I’ve had equipment damaged before, but this was the first total failure in 16 years of 4×4 and probably 500+ recoveries. I had a safety strap in place, so no vehicle damage or human injury was done.

Then, one last tip. After a big recovery operation, recovery equipment can easily get mixed up, so it’s good idea to mark your recovery equipment. Some paint their shackles a certain colour, but I chose to mark all my stuff with red cable ties.