Warn Winch Accessories – Another in the Borneo Series

Shannon Bushman | December 11, 2009 | 0 Comments

Nobody ever tells you what you really need in a winching situation. Many of us drive around with a winch mounted for years before we finally get into a situation that makes us realize we need the right accessories to be truly effective with our winch.

Warn makes a basic “Accessories Kit” which includes two 1″ x 8′ tree save straps, two D-Shackes aka Clevis Hooks, and a snatch block in a nice cordura nylon carrying bag. We will be taking one of these along on the expedition to Borneo but we are taking a few other items that experience tells us we will need. Seldom is there a good anchor point less than 50′ from your rig. Given that you need to leave several spools of wire on the drum to get an effective pull it would generally need to be closer than 50′. So, two 50′ synthetic rope sections with ring thimbles in both ends have been added to our kit to give us extra reach as a 50′ wire rope section. D-Shackles are used to connect things like our synthetic rope sections or to secure the tree straps around an anchor point. We will actually be taking four D-Shackles to deal with our rope extensions.

Parallel Gripping Pliers
The wire rope section is to be used with our pulling pliers. What is that you ask? Well it’s a clever idea really. When linemen pull cables they use these devices. The pliers are designed to clamp a cable and secure it tightly without damaging the wire. Then a winch can be attached to the pliers and pull a length of wire that could never be pulled by hand. The same technique happens to work very well with UTVs. It gives you a great deal of flexibility when you are doing a long winch and makes up for the fact that the synthetic extensions we have are fixed length. Do not attempt to use these on synthetic rope, you will regret it immediately as it slices your rope in half. You can buy gripping pliers from www.montanajacks.com.