Warn Industries’ sister company, Factor 55, not only produces amazing American-made rigging components, they also invented the CLOSED SYSTEM WINCHING™ technique. This method uses rigging gear that creates a closed system with the inability for any of it to come loose. The Idaho-based company has been espousing the virtues of this rigging technique for years, and in this video, we’ll talk a lot more about it. We’ll also look at many of the Factor 55 accessories in XTV or powersports sizes. Keep in mind, all these parts are also available for the truck, Jeep, and SUV market. We’ll also showcase the HitchLink and the Rope Retention Pulley (RRP), and look at some of the great recovery kits Factor 55 offers.
Transcript
Hello everyone, I’m Justin with Factor 55 and Warn Industries. We’re here today at Ken Baker’s farm in the Pacific Northwest to take this opportunity to show you and share with you some rigging techniques with Factor 55 USA-made accessories. So we’re going to get into some examples of a single-line, double-line pull, a redirectional pull, and how you can see our high-quality, tested, USA-made products in use and learn more about the details about the most secure and reliable rigging which is CLOSED SYSTEM WINCHING™.
CLOSED SYSTEM WINCHING is the most secure way to use your vehicle recovery winch. And the way that you do that is starting at the very basis of using a winch-line shackle mount, that interfaces with a screw-pin shackle. And it’s so simple. You simply open the end of the pin, you take the shackle mount; it interfaces with the pin of the shackle pin slides in and you tighten the pin down. Now once that’s done, nothing can come loose in this system. Whether this is attached to another recovery point on a vehicle or whether it’s attached to two eyelets of a strap and the end of the winch line. You can drag this through the rocks, whether you have tension or slack, slack and tension nothing can come through this until you back the pin off and that’s CLOSED SYSTEM WINCHING.
Improper use of hooks can lead to failures. But as soon as you screw the pin in of that shackle, the interface with the end of that winch line, nothing in this rigging tackle can come undone.
Winch Line Shackle Mounts
So now you start with that is the basic line of winch line shackle mounts offered by Factor 55.
The ProLink XTV is the very simple basic, it’s our simple thimble. It interfaces with a titanium double shear pin and goes right onto the end of the line. And as you can see, interfaces with the pin end of a 5/8” screw pin shackle. Now you can also use a synthetic or soft shackle at the end of this, but this is the easiest way to interface through the end of that.
Moving past the ProLink XTV, we actually have our FlatLink XTV. Now the FlatLink XTV is just like the ProLink XTV where it has a titanium double shear pin. It pulls in and lays flush against the fair lead surface. Each one of the shackle mounts has integrated rubber pads to prevent metal-to-metal connection. But the interesting thing with the FlatLink XTV is now not only can you use the pin end of the shackle to interface through here you can actually take the body of the shackle and pass that through there for a single shackle connection So this can make it more versatile to attach to bumper connections or other various pieces of rigging. The other thing is, is when you go to use a synthetic or soft shackle, you don’t have to fight it so much because of the oval hole opening. It’s easier to pass through that opening. And one other great versatile feature about the FlatLink XTV, because let’s say you don’t have, uh, rigging components that are sized for your side by side. Even if you have a full size ¾” shackle, you can now take the pin end of that full-size shackle and interface that through there and it will still work and fit. So this is one of the most versatile shackle mounts that we offer.
Now coming from the FlatLink XTV, now we go all the way up to our UltraHook. Now the UltraHook XTV was specifically designed for off-road racing purposes, to where you would have a quick attachment point when seconds matter, when you’re off-road. It turns out that it’s had a lot more capability in the tactical, world, for our military users, and also for fire departments and search and rescue worldwide. But this hook is innovative in the fact that not only does it have the closed system shackle mount that features on the end of the UltraHook, but it also now in the throat opening of the hook, you can actually use that full-size ¾” shackle and still snap it on the end there. And that’s the only UTV winch hook in the world that will interface with a full-size 3/4 shackle.
ACCESSORIES
One important tool to always have with you would be having a good shovel. Having a good, reliable shovel is a great tool and device that you should carry with your vehicle that can help clear debris away from the tires and to help to get the vehicle, especially if it’s stuck in mud, to help really get that thing out. So a good reliable shovel is a good tool.
Past the shovel, having a winch line damper have or a recovery damper on any type of rigging that’s out, keeping a damper with you is also a great tool, especially if you’re winching across a road and it’s a good signal to see that people know that a recovery is taking place.
Hemmingway Kit
For side-by-sides, just like for full-size truck and SUVs, we have right here, featured with us today, is our Hemingway recovery kit. The Hemingway recovery kit for side-by-sides is the full kit for winching and non-winching scenarios for UTV. We do make these for full-size Jeep truck and SUVs and all the way up to big military 30,000-pound vehicles. One of the neat things is here is as you can see, it’s raining on us today out here in the Pacific Northwest. And this wax canvas that the bag is made of is almost waterproof. And this thing can sit outside in the elements and keep everything dry in the inside of your bag. Cool thing about this, the kit will unzip on either side and lay open. Now that it’s open, you can get easy access to all the different components inside of the bag.
So whether you’re using soft shackles, whether you’re using hard shackles, you’ve got a 30-foot tow strap in here, 30-foot tow strap as high dense polyester. It’s got minimal to no stretch. You can use this as a static sling or also to tow a vehicle. You got a tree saver, which is just a smaller, wider version of that same tow strap. Great use for wrapping around a tree or to set up as a bridal. We also have a kinetic energy rope. This is going to be our 5/8” x 20-foot rope, perfectly sized for your side-by-side. We have our rope retention pulley. The rope retention pulley is designed to be a lightweight replacement for your snatch block. And so you guys will see this thing in use as we set this up with this machine and how this can really, be valuable to redirect your winch line or increase the mechanical advantage off-road. And also a hitch receiver shackle mount. And this is going to be great to go inside of a vehicle that you’re trying to recover or your own personal vehicle. Whether it’s in your vehicle doing a recovery or whether it’s in a vehicle that you’re going to slide this into to recover from, to take the frame mount receiver point and make that a dedicated recovery point. So this hitch receiver shackle mount is another valuable tool. One thing about dampers is you can also use the bag itself even as a damper if you need to. On the outside pockets here you can also store the most valuable piece of your recovery gear, which is going to be gloves.
Gloves
Gloves are the number one recovery tool to use. You always want to have it on before you start any winching or recovery operation to save your hands and your fingers any kind of scenario. So gloves are the number one tool. Past the use of all this, different individual rigging components, then one other thing we’re going to show you is also a land anchor.
Land Anchor
In case you’re somewhere where you don’t have a tree, you don’t have a rock, you don’t have a good attachment point to go to another vehicle, this could be a valuable asset to you, especially in the sand, or any place that doesn’t have another reliable point.
SINGLE LINE PULL
So we’re going to start with a simple single-line pull and kind of walk you through the method of how you can achieve that.
So right here we’ve got our Hemingway recovery kit for UTVs and side-by-sides. The advantage with this kit, again, is just unzipped the sides and the whole kit lays open. Now you have access to every single component that you need from inside. We got this nice tree here. We got a big anchor point to grab onto. So we want to get out our tree saver strap, which is going to be a wide flat strap, so that way it won’t harm the tree and will allow us to get a dedicated anchor point to winch up our vehicle. You undo the strap wrap, get the tree saver out, and grab both eyelets around the tree.
We want to keep that strap low and tight and that way we know that we are going to be at a good point and we’re not, we’re not going to get too much leverage on this tree here. We don’t have to worry about it too much because their side-by-side is lightweight. But now we can capture both eyelets right here from our tree saver. Now how do we connect to this tree saver?
Well, there are two methods that we can use.
We do have our UltraHook product right here. Again, it’s got the closed system shackle mount or the quick hook opening. Now, what how we can rig this is we can either use a hard shackle, we can undo the pin of our hard shackle and trap both eyelets of the strap in the bow end of the shackle and either attach the hook throat opening or we can run it through there and attach the pin to the closed system shackle mount. But seeing how this tree is a little wide and our strap feels a little tight, we can also use a soft shackle.
Now, this soft shackle is made out of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene is the same type of fibers that you’ll find in your synthetic winch line. So this is just a larger diameter version of the rope that you already are using with your synthetic winch line. The soft shackle is a very simple tool. You grab onto the knot, grab onto the outer end and twist, and the noose opens up and the knot simply falls out.
From here, you can take the two eyelets of your strap, connect the soft shackle and run it through those two eyelets. Open up the noose again, take the knot of the soft shackle through here once it interfaces through the noose under load it self-tightens.
A couple of key features with the UltraHook XTV that you’ll find not only with this smaller version of this part and also our full-size UltraHook, is that this hook has got integrated finger grips in the bottom. And what that’s for is to promote hooking up from underneath to remind you that when you grab onto this part you want to grab your rigging and hook up from the bottom. The reason why is because if there’s any type of load or if it tip loads or you had any type of failure on this hook or any hook what would happen is, is that if that failed, it would shoot the energy down towards the ground versus if it was hooked down and it came loose, that would fling it back of the vehicle behind you.
One additional feature is that there’s a ball detent pin that’s stored into the body of the hook right here. When you take that ball detent pin out, if you’re going to use the hook throat opening in this kind of situation, you can take this pin, you can snap it into the top and you can lock the latch into place. So no matter what kind of crazy thing could happen, slack tension, slack tension on this rigging, it stays secure and now you’ve closed that system.
Now once we, before we go back and put some tension on the line, you can either use a traditional style winch damper, a winch line damper to go on here, or you could also use the excess of your recovery gear bag to also hang on the end of the line to act as a damper as well. Either one of those will work but for this case we’re just going to use this line damper on here. We’re going to open that up, stick the line in there, fold that shut, keep our gear out of the way. Let’s get to winching.
DOUBLE LINE PULL
So now that you’ve seen a single line pull, let’s talk about a double-line pull using a pulley in order to create mechanical advantage. So we simply start out with our tree saver strap. Again, we want to get this around a tree. You want to make sure there’s no twists in the strap and that it’s secured. You’re going to come down and have the eyelets of the strap together, make sure everything is in line. And again, you can use a hard shackle or soft shackle just like we used in the first one.
We have our soft shackle here. We’re going to take the eyelets of the strap and put that in there. Now instead of just taking this and already interfacing it with our winch line shackle mount, we are going to introduce our rope retention pulley.
Now the rope retention pulley is the Factor 55 innovative snatch block. Now this, what this is, is it’s basically a friction ring. There are many types of rings like this that have been used for decades on the market, but something that’s really unique about our ring is the rope retentions feature, which are these little silicone teeth around the ring itself. Now what that does is when the rope falls inside of this pulley when the rope goes to slack, the rope can’t fall out. But under tension it allows it to rotate. So you simply take the pulley into your soft shackle, thread it right through the middle, open up the noose of your soft shackle then you take your knot to go through that noose again. That noose will self-tighten under load. And now you have the pulley system set up with your tree saver.
Now what’s really great about this is that it doesn’t weigh any, it doesn’t weigh anything. I mean it’s super lightweight. You also don’t have to deal with undoing and re-screwing the pin of a shackle and having to worry about maybe pinching your fingers with a heavy steel snatch block. So this is really functional in this configuration.
Another unique feature about the pulley is that it’s got a larger inner radius. So it’s going to keep the legs of the soft shackle from dragging on the ends of the pulley while it’s under load. It’s also been impregnated with Teflon, which makes this even slicker, against the mil-spec type-three hard anodizing. And it’ll help to rotate around the ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene that the soft shackles made out of. So these fibers in this rope, the same thing with your synthetic winch line, is self-lubricating. So it’s going to act as the bearing in the pulley system.
And how that functions is once this is set up here, you simply take the end of your winch line you can pass that through the opening of the soft shackle, and the rope will fall right down into the pocket of the pulley. And then you don’t have to worry about the rope coming out of those fingers.
Now you can set this down, take the end of your winch line shackle mount and go back to the vehicle which we can discuss how that is going to be rigged up there. So again, this pulley, what this is going to create, it’s going to put, it’s going to get more rope off the drum. So the winch is going to work more efficient, it’s going to cut the line speed in half so that way the winch is not working as hard and you’re getting the maximum pull possible from the least layers of rope on the drum.
Now what pullies initially are designed to do is for mechanical advantage or the redirection of force. So what you can find is more information about that on our website in our basic guide to winching manuals or from any local recovery trainer that may be in your area.
It’s the best practice to get out and use this equipment so you know how it’s going to work no matter what the weather conditions are. So now let’s get some dampers on these winch lines and let’s get back to the vehicle and wrap this up.
And we’ll talk about how to attach this to our side-by-side. Now that we’re back here at the front of our machine and we’ve got our winch line going out, we’ve got winch line off the drum. So now we’re going to get the max pull capacity off the drum and we’ve got it run through our RRP. And now we’ve got the end of our winch line coming back to this vehicle. We can look here to see to find a good attachment point.
Well, we have a hard shackle but there’s no shackle tabs and no place to put this. So one other option is to use an additional soft shackle. So this is our extreme duty version of our soft shackle. It’s got fiber lock coating over top of the exposed, fibers here and then it also has a wrapped coating on the outside in order to protect the inner core fibers from water and mud and debris, etc. So what this can do is this can handle abrasion a little bit better than just a regular soft shackle.
Now if we look at the front of this machine, we wouldn’t want to pull from the ends of this or get weird angles but if we look through here we can see that this is gusted, it’s welded, it’s bolted to the frame here, it’s bolted the frame here. So we know that this is going to be a good area around here where there’s no sharp attachment points and probably a good place that we can attach our soft shackle and bring our rigging back to this. So we can take our soft shackle, open up the noose, get the ball to come out wrap that around that point again, noose, open, knot comes around, goes through and now we have a secure attachment point to the front of the vehicle.
We can now take our UltraHook and again, like any other winch hook, we want the hook throat opening facing up, so we got our finger grips on the bottom. We’re going to come in through here and just snap that in. And now we’ve got securely attached right through here with a solid rigging connection. We can open and take this ball detent pin out as well and lock the latch into place again just for additional safety. So that way if we have some slack or we’re just going to get slippery in this mud and if something were to shift and move around, we don’t have to worry about the soft shackle coming loose or loading our latch.
So let’s get into pulling.
DIRECTIONAL CHANGE
Pulley blocks or snatch blocks can also be used for the redirection of force. So if you’re in an instance where you need to winch around a corner, whether to attach another vehicle or another anchor point, this is a really good example of how that can be done.
We’ve got our tree saver, we have our soft shackle, but now something that’s even easier to use than a traditional swing plate pulley block is going to be our rope retention pulley or our R.R.P. And you simply take your soft shackle feed it through the center, you’re going to take the two eyelets of your tree saver, your tree strap, take your soft shackle, feed that through there. Now open up the noose of the soft shackle. Take the knot of the soft shackle, stick it through that noose, and again, it will self-tighten under load. Now that you have this setup, your pulley is ready to go.
You can simply grab the end of your winch line like this even with your attachment on the end, feed it through this soft shackle, pull all the rope through that and let it fall down in between the pulley and it’s that easy. Now that’s down on the ground, we simply take our winch line shackle mount and head over to the other anchor point. Now what this will allow you to do is to get more rope off the drum and makes the winch run more efficiently and it’ll also keep the rope center spooling on the drum of the winch instead of binding up into the corners which could potentially leading the rope to fail.
So now we’ve come over to this additional anchor point. Instead of using a strap around a tree, we’re now going to be using a hitch receiver shackle mount. This hitch receiver shackle mount is one of our HitchLink products and it interfaces right with the hitch pin on the rear receiver of any vehicle. Now the cool thing is that with the UltraHook XTV for UTVs and side-by-sides, you can have a full-size ¾” shackle that interfaces with the HitchLink and you can still use the hook opening on the UTV-sized hook to even fit on a full-size ¾” shackle.
Now in this scenario, our tree is a little bit to the passenger side of the truck here which means that we would be pulling on this shackle at an angle. Now not necessarily that huge deal because of the weight and the size of our vehicle, but for safety purposes, we’ll show you another method. You can take the hook off of this full-size shackle, remove the ¾” screw pin shackle, and simply use a soft shackle.
Now, this soft shackle is our Extreme Duty version of our soft shackle. So it features a fiber lock coating on the fibers to keep them from fraying and protect them from water and debris. It also has this extra coating on the outside for abrasion resistance and also for mud and debris penetration into the fibers. That soft shackle can simply go right through the hitch receiver shackle mount, and then you can even take it through the closed system shackle mount on the end of the UltraHook.
Once you open the noose of that soft shackle and take the knot and stick it through the noose, it’ll cinch down under load and now you have a secure connection using the soft shackle. So as you can see with setting up the soft shackle in this manner, the hook throat is facing down. So again, it’s important to make sure that even in this configuration, you want the finger grips to be facing this way.
So it’s always fine to reset your rigging to make sure you do that properly. So keep in mind again, the hook is going to face up. So in the event that you don’t have a hitch receiver shackle mount and that there is a drop hitch or a ball or something that’s in between here and you can’t find the key of the lock, you want to avoid attaching to any type of component that way. Those are designed for the tongue weight of a trailer to press down on that ball for flat towing. They’re not meant for vehicle extraction. Do not use a drop hitch or a ball to recover a vehicle. The momentary loads and that shock could tear that off and people have lost their lives because of this.
So one other method that you could use if you needed to in an emergency is to take a soft shackle or a small sling and simply attach it around the crossmember of the frame. And you could do that very easily just like this. Now you’ve taken the soft shackle, you’ve gone around a dedicated piece of the frame that’s part of the crossmember and the frame of the back of this vehicle and then you can take your hook and either run it through the eyelet through there or simply snap it into the shackle tab opening and be able to begin your winch pull safely and securely.
CONCLUSION
Thank you guys for joining us today. We hope that you learned a lot about Factor 55 and CLOSED SYSTEM WINCHING techniques. For further information, you can check out warn.com or factor55.com and make sure that you are Equipped To Explore the next time you head out for your next backcountry adventure.
