Soft shackle versus hard (steel) shackle for 4x4 recovery operations: Which shackle do you use, and where to you use them to maximise safety and reliability? The definitive guide.  

14.7 tonne Saber soft shackle from Sparesbox: http://bit.ly/14softshackle

17 tonne Saber soft shackle from Sparesbox: http://bit.ly/17softshackle

4.75 steel bow shackle from Sparesbox: http://bit.ly/bowshackle

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There’s two parts to this, right? First - the part about relative positives and negatives. Second - the part about myth-busting the bullshit of 4WD recovery. There’s a lot of that. See, shackles and other items - wire rope in winches, slings … things of that nature - are generally adapted from the hoisting industry (you know, cranes and such)...  ...and the parts have been cobbled together to form a system for off-road recovery, which (kinda) works. If you take a shackle and a sling and a wire rope hoist and a hook, maybe a snatch block, you’re essentially looking at the load-bearing parts of a winch recovery.  And the way the numbers work, the way they are presented to you, and the bullshit claims made about some of the parts in particular - especially winches - the former Soviet Union bureaucracy couldn't do a worse job, frankly.   This is compounded by never really knowing what the actual loads are. See, if you want to put a tank under a giant crane, one generally knows exactly how much it weighs, and one can then put a hoisting package together so that the working load limit of each component is not exceeded. Recovery is not like that - there’s generally no way of knowing the loads.  It’s all quite confusing, frankly, if you don’t have engineering training or work in industry. So I’m gunna unpack some of that right now - the beer-garden physics of recovery.  For this report I got my Saber soft shackle from Sparesbox. About $60 - link in the description. I had a bunch of steel shackles lying around already. Who doesn’t? Steel shackles last (statistically) for eternity, which is almost as long as it’s been since I’ve had ‘it’ thrown at me with at least vestigial enthusiasm.   Links to the hard and soft shackles from Sparesbox, in the description. Full disclosure there: I’ll get a small commission if you purchase using those links. Sparesbox is a good, reliable operation based in Sydney - but they’re not sponsoring this episode. I bought the soft shackle myself, and this report is my honest personal opinion.