4WD Snatch recoveries are popular and pretty straight forward when you think about them, you are basically trying to bungee your vehicle out. But don’t be fooled if you don’t take caution a Snatch recovery can turn bad really quickly so here are the  6 main reasons why a snatch recovery is not ideal for every recovery situation offroad and how you can improve your offroad recoveries and make 4WDing much safer.

If you follow these 6 bits of pro advice, you should never have a problem with offroad recoveries again!

1.Overused and dirty equipment!

When you hit the tracks regularly, wear and tear on your gear is not as easily identifiable, however when you have used your gear for weeks and weeks you should always inspect your gear for damage and wear and tear.  This includes mud sand and dirt, when you get back from a trip away on the tracks, its good practice to check over your vehicle for damage get your vehicle roadworthy again as soon as you get home – this should extend to your recovery gear as well.

Things like nicks and tears along with leaving your gear muddy can reduce the strength of your snatch strap by over 50% – that’s an insane amount of weakness, mud is made up of plenty of tiny grains of dirt that make their way deep inside the weave of the fibres. You may not have looked at too many grains of dirt under a microscope but dirt is extremely abrasive and can cut a tense strap from the inside out!

So wash your snatch strap as soon as you can to get rid of as much dirt as you can, there is a particular method of washing that involves rinsing several times until your strap comes out clean, you can do this when you are washing your car, but don’t be tempted to pressure wash or scrub with a brush as this can actually drive dirt deeper into the material.

with a clean strap, you will keep your straps lasting much longer, and if you find damage on your strap you should retire it immediately, a Snatch strap kit is cheap and by replacing it you remove any risk of injury or damaging your vehicle – think of fresh recovery gear like a cheap insurance policy!

2.Zero Preparation

One of the biggest reasons for a failed snatch strap recovery is jumping straight for the strap as soon as you get stuck, this is rookie error #2 by preparing your stuck vehicle to be pulled free, by pulling out the shovel and clearing as much of the obstruction as possible you reduce the amount of force required by the towing vehicle, as well as the loads put on your recovery points and recovery gear.

With your vehicle buried to its chassis in sand or mud, you are looking at pulling over 3 times the weight of your 4WD to get free, with an empty 4WD weighing in somewhere between 2.5 tons and 4.5tons you can easily exceed the load rating of your recovery gear and unknowingly dramatically increase the danger of a simple recovery.

By clearing a path for your tyres, you ease the amount of force required in the recovery and make the job of your towing vehicle that much easier and give you more chance of being pulled free first time every-time!

3. Tow balls and towing points are not rated!

When you bought your 4WD, it more than likely advertised its massive 3500KG towing capacity, so what’s the go with “rated recovery points” and why can’t we just use our factory fitted tow ball to connect our snatch strap to our 4WD?

This is simple, when you are towing a trailer, your vehicle isn’t handling 3500kg of towing force at any given moment, this rating is the amount of “braked” trailer weight your vehicle can safely tow at a reasonable speed, and when looking at trailers a reoccurring figure of “ball weight” comes up.

Ball weight is the amount of weight a tow ball can handle in a vertical axis, this figure is usually no more than a couple of hundred kilograms, and if forces as large as what you experience during a recovery, a tow ball very quickly becomes a cannonball and can turn a safe recovery into a potentially lethal situation very quickly.

If you have a standard tow hitch you can use your rear tow bar receiver to mount a Tow Hitch Receiver which is a solid steel bar which mounts safely into the rear of your 4WD to convert a tow bar into a rated recovery point capable of handling tough offroad recoveries!

And those neat looking hooks on the front of your 4WD are not rated for recoveries either, they are for locking your 4WD in place when in transit, or pulling onto the back of a tow truck – many people equalize the load on their tow straps to share the force between both sides of their vehicle, this is where a Hercules Tree Trunk Protector from a Hercules Recovery Kit come in handy, by fastening either end to these tow points you create a “bridle” that can handle the whole load of a recovery easily!

Moral of the story – NEVER USE A TOW BALL OR TOWING POINT IN A RECOVERY!  

4. Knots and not using the “Z”

When engaging in a 4WD recovery you NEED to use ultimate caution to ensure that you follow the rules to make sure all of your passengers, spectators and even other drivers make it home in one piece.

Upon unrolling your snatch strap, you should double check that there is no damage anywhere along the strap. When laying out the strap, make sure that it has no twists at all, and that you have roughly 1 meter of “Z” somewhere towards the middle of the strap.

The Z in the recovery strap is ESSENTIAL for safety and allows the strap enough slack to act as a bungee cord, with too little or too much “snatch” resulting in the forces found in the recovery from peaking during this peak you can put a much greater load than expected on both the towing vehicle and the stuck vehicle.

5.Recovery vehicle speed

Eyeballing the speed you require the ‘tow vehicle’ to be going can be difficult, but using the appropriate 1m “Z” means you can get away with a much slower tow speed than you’d expect – We recommend the first attempt using 2nd gear with your 4WD in low range and 2500rpm. By using low range, you put a much smaller load on your drivetrain, and are less likely to get the tow vehicle stuck. 2^nd gear gives you enough momentum to yank the stuck vehicle free, whilst also allowing the tow vehicle to pull the stuck vehicle free.

With the speed roughly dialed in you should be able to get the stuck vehicle moving but without a proper way of communicating, when should the tow stop? The good old days, old timers used a system of beeping horns to get the job done right, now days with affordable UHF units, we can easily talk to the other driver to keep them clued in to when the stuck driver is ready to be pulled free, and also when the job is done!

By fitting a powerful UHF system like the Oricom UHF380 to your vehicle you can easily keep in touch with your convoy and give other drivers a heads up on the conditions ahead!

6.Not maintaining momentum of tow vehicle!

One of the last reasons that a snatch strap recovery fails, is by losing momentum before the stuck vehicle is free, this is why using a UHF can come in handy, there is no point pulling a vehicle from being bogged in one place to both vehicles getting stuck elsewhere.

This another reason why a recovery vehicle should be put in low range before recovering another vehicle is to keep as much torque and pulling power on the strap and get the stuck vehicle free, if you attempt in high range, you risk burying your towing vehicle and having a completely unsuccessful and require an escalation of efforts.

If a snatch strap recovery just isn’t enough to get your vehicle free, you need to get setup with a quality 12,000lb winch like the Domin8r X Winch, when coupled with a Hercules Recovery Kit will make your 4WD absolutely unstoppable on the tracks!