Winch Safety

Gidday fellas

I spent a number of years doing recovery in the army. My actual job was known as a RECOVERY MECHANIC. The course that the army puts you through is thorough and deals with all perspectives from doing lift tows to winch safety through to complex recovery tasks. At the beginning of the course we watched several safety films from the CATERPILLA company.

In one of these films it showed two D9 dozers with a winch rope secured in between them. Around the vehiles were various 44 gallon drums filled with water. Now granted, for the demonstration the steel wire rope (approx 9/16") was not secured overly tight to the rear of one of the dozers.The intention was for one of the dozers to drive forward and see what would happen.

The film was first shown in normal speed and once the breaking point was reached you could just see the rope let go and then the drums of water were then hit by the winch rope. Now these drums were about 120' away from the vehicles. the length of rope attached to the dozers was about 100'.

What actually happens is that the rope stretches due to its elasticity and acts just like a giant bull whip. When shown in slow motion, the whipping action of the rope could be clearly seen.

Upon completion of the demonstration the cameras showed the 44 gallon drums with a rather nice ragged slice about 12" from the top of the drum. Now just imagine if a person was standing in the path of one of these ropes. the consequences wouldn't be nice.

They also showed the telltale signs of a rope was under too much tension. When a rope is in this situation it will do what is called singing. That means the rope will start moving up and down, slightly at first and getting more violent as more tension is placed on the rope. Release the tension and it will stop singing.

Thus the army in its wisdom always ensures that in winching operations that no personell other than the crew that are operating the winches are allowed within 1 and 1/2 times the radius of the amount of winch rope that is paid out. That is to say if there is 100metres of rope out then the safety distance is a minimum of 150 metre in radius.

During the course one of the cardinal sins that you can perform is a breach of safety.

One more point I forgot to mention is NEVER EVER STEP OVER A WINCH ROPE THAT IS UNDER TENSION.

Just remember when doing anything with a winch, please exercise a little bit of COMMON SENSE.