Its pretty rude that Jeep drivers are maintaining dominance in the world of buying an expensive toy and thinking the are professional off road drivers and are working to take from BMW drivers the title of most entitled bad drivers on the roads too
I got cut off (in 25 mph residential small street traffic in my wee electric car) by that exact fucking truck a few days ago!
I remember laughing, cause dude was driving like a total ass, like, "It's one lane friend, the best you are doing is getting one car ahead and sucking on the next car's bumper."
It was a lifted, black, RAM and I HAD TO KNOW what asshat is driving this, and I saw the tiniest white boy driving it (think original British office Dwight) and I just laughed and laughed. Somehow it made sense - THAT'S who buys this vehicle (and I am also a truck owner, but not suped up, and I actually use it for construction, so I'm not driving over people to get to the fucking office!).
My brother in law drove a tow truck for nearly a decade.
He had to tell many a Jeep driver they are SOL. People think that 4x4 is magic, and forget that if they are one of the only vehicles that can make it out that far, then that means nobody can come after them with the equipment to bring it out.
Edit: Yes, you can get a team of people with specialized equipment to dig you out. But it can cost you a LOT more than a standard tow.
I'm not sure if gearing had anything to do with this. The rolling motion of the towing truck is what caused the additional tension on the cable as it snapped when the cable was taut.
If the towing truck doesn't have the torque and momentum to pull the Jeep out while taut, it ain't happening.
Edit: yes, I agree about OP's ambiguous use of "gear" but I'll state my point still stands that the jerking motion is what caused the snap.
Certainly possible that the towing gear in use is the reason they could not pull the Jeep out. Watching the video, it is evident that the rolling start is what caused the line to snap back at his windshield (point of the video).
The rolling start is how you're supposed to do it if you're using kinetic cable. They're designed to stretch so you can use momentum to your advantage rather than pulling from a dead stop. However if you try to do this with a standard pull cable, you'll get exactly what happened in the video. So i don't know what kind of cable they were using, but I assume that's what the title is referring to, and they had the wrong cable type.
Never relax the cable like that then gun it. You gain momentum sure, but you are putting that stress on the chain, and the tow hitches, long before you put any serious power into moving the jeep.
This it Newtons first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest.
Pull the chain tight then apply power. If it doesn't move, it was never going to move. The jeep is cemented into the mud, and the truck cant provide enough torque.
it depends on if this a chain / recovery strap or a kinetic rope. hard to tell from the video. kinectic ropes you do actually want to accelerate (not necessarily gun it)
Most of the people here have no idea about the equipment for this type of recovery. It appears this was a mix of town strap and chain. Kinetic is for sure the way to go here if there is no winch around. Either way, jeep front glass is super easy to replace cause its flat
They meant gear as in equipment, not which gear the vehicle was in. They make recovery equipment with more elasticity and softer ends that won't shoot through your windshield like this if they snap.
That thing is buried in mud above the frame, it’s an actual foundation at this point. “Almost there” is a ridiculous statement. That jeep never moved a MM.
Surely the guy yelling "almost there" and "little more" is just egging on the situation because he knows it's a lost cause and he's just having a good internal laugh, right? Right???
That might very well be, he may understand the futility. I do think this is a situation where waving your arms yelling “stop”and “what the fuck are you idiots thinking?” is more appropriate. They are seriously lucky no one was killed here.
Remember that first week of the first physics class you ever took? Where they're talking in very simple terms about relatable things like the difference between rolling a ball and pushing a cinderblock? Yeah, this is a cinderblock, covered in sandpaper, on a surface also covered in sandpaper, with a big fat guy laying in front of it. Every one of those basic physics principles is working against you here. Your boat rope means nothing.
Not to mention the fact that towing anything in that kind of mud is a slow, applied tension situation and not a "backup to get a bunch of slack and then fucking floor it" situation.
I've never been 4 wheeling, don't own a 4WD vehicle but I watch Matt every week.
I've learned that you NEVER try to get a vehicle out of mud with anything but a slow/steady pull.
That strap could kill someone or at the very least damage the vehicle
I got a morbid chuckle out of that line. What the fuck those people were thinking is beyond me. Not that they were going to get it out because as you say, it was well and truly stuck and mud like that is basically a suction cup, but even if it were in a position it could be towed out from, this is exactly not how you would ever do it.
It reads like the guy saying "almost" was just baiting for retries until the obvious/eventual bad outcome happened.
Some people do just love to give bad advice and watch.
Doesn't matter if the vehicle being recovered is literally suction cupped into wet mud. They need to start digging. They could be chained to a tank and all it would do is rip the unibody off the drivetrain.
Former recovery professional here. You should not use a kinetic rope in this situation either. That Jeep ain't coming out safely without a recovery truck that can get some lift.
Ex farmer here. You'd be amazed at the shit you can pull out of the mud with enough torque and traction.
'Stuckest' thing I ever pulled out was a tanker truck with a 2000 gallon tank on the back that sank up to the frame. We had some 80 ton chains for that.
That's a heavy-duty truck though, not a Jeep Wrangler.
I guarantee you that if you hooked up a kinetic rope and yanked on this thing, it's coming apart. Doesn't matter where you attach, axles or frame, the other part is getting left behind lol. I've seen it happen multiple times.
Oh fuck yeah it is. Even with a recovery truck, I'd want to dig this thing out somewhat.
In the military one method they sometimes use is placing small explosive charges to help break the suction underneath tanks when they get mired like this.
Yeah I was also expecting the towing car to reverse instead of drive forward by mistake or something, but it was the towing gear that was wrong lol. Plot twist!
The best case would be to get a rollback with a good winch, get traction boards under the Jeep's wheels and use the winch to try to get just enough momentum that it can wobble up and out. An expensive recovery, but doable. That truck was never gonna move it.
The "what happens if it breaks" question is supposed to be addressed with a blanket, towel, or other similar object. You drape it over the cable to take most of the energy out of the whip. The Jeep also should have opened the hood all the way up. A dent in your hood is much better than a shattered window and skull.
I remember seeing the victim of a failed tow like this on the internet decades ago. His skull was obliterated when the tow hitch broke off and flung its way back to him exactly like this video. The hitch essentially became a medieval mace.
It’s worse than it looks. In this case they were using the lowered ball hitch as a tow point and it broke free due to the torque forces. Recovering vehicles is deadly if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I see a lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing
This was only a few years ago. I’m sure similar incidents have happened hundreds or thousands of times
Can confirm, a young guy was killed here in Australia a while back from this exact thing, although I think it went through his back window.
The tow hitch snapped off the other vehicle towing, it flung back to hit him in the back of the head killing him instantly.
That’s why you take the hitch out and use soft shackles and a weighted blanket on the recovery rope so you don’t create a massive slingshot and give it a heavy projectile it can shoot you with.
Looks like the had 2 straps/ropes tied/knotted together. Tow ropes are for towing and jerk ropes (Kinetic) are for.... jerking. My father always carried a jerk rope in his truck, a Chevy 3500 HD. We lived in Wyoming and every winter he'd pull people out dirches/deep snow on the side of the road. One summer we went down to South Padre Island. There was a Jeep Grand Cherokee stuck in wet sand worse than this one. The tide was coming in and it was sank enough they couldn't open the drivers side doors, it had sank up a good 8" past the frame. The guy was crawling in and out of the window as various people tried to help dig him out then pull. Dad hooked the Jerk rope up and couldn't budge it. Another guy with a 3500 happened along who had a chain. He hooked the chain up to my Father's truck who had the jerk rope on the Jeep. They got the chain tight and left a lot of slack in the jerk rope. It went from a good 1 1/2" - 2" diameter to about the size of a pencil and....slowly crept forward. Pulled him right out. It was like watching a Chevrolet commercial in real life. A guy with a Bronco tried right before that. Hooked on with a 3" lifting strap about 20' long and snapped it with a running start. Definetely made in impression on knowing/understamding the purpose and rating of straps/chains/ropes/etc...
This is how you get somebody killed. The strap shot right through the drivers side of the windshield. I've seen video of failed recovery attempts where there hitch or ratchet assembly of a strap launches right into the face of one of the drivers. There's A LOT of forces at play with extracting a vehicle stuck in the mud.
I mean... not every death is immediate. Not saying this guy for sure died, but being alive and conscious shortly after injury, and dying later isn't all that uncommon.
When I was a kid, my father and I would cut firewood. We had cut down a nice birch up a hill and needed to get it down to the road. We put a block and tackle up in a tree by the road to pull it down and used the truck to pull it. Dad is in the truck pulling the rope and the log brought up on a stump. Dad kept pulling and the rope went under serious tension. I was up the hill trying to free the log from the stump with my peavey and I could hear the rope starting to "ping". That was the danger sign Dad told me to watch for, so I stepped back and started yelling for dad to stop. He did not hear me. The rope broke between the block and the truck. I heard what sounded like a gunshot and then breaking glass. The end of the rope went through both the back and front window of the truck. Dad ended up with a cut on his face, we're not sure if from the rope passing by or the flying glass.
It’s hard to appreciate these things without experiencing it yourself. Very lucky for you and your dad, good that you had been told about the pinging!
I work in construction, one day a dozer got stuck half tipped in soft material, so we had another dozer trying to pull it free with a chain. When they started the pull, I saw the chain go tight, then visibly stretch like an elastic. I started to draw a breath to shout, and it snapped, and fired at the towing dozer.
Luckily none of the chain went into the cab, but there were long sections of the chain that were seized into like, rods. When the links stretched, they got narrower, and then the rebound compression between the links caused them to overlap and bind into their neighbouring link.
An easy way to mitigate a snapped cable from becoming a ballistic bolo is to drape something like a hoodie or jacket over the cable at the connections ~ something with a little heft, springiness, and surface area
I've seen video of a ball hitch breaking loose and launching directly into the stuck vehicle drivers head... don't perform recovery operations unless you know exactly what you are doing
Aside from using the right equipment/technique, this is also why you prop the hood up on the vehicle being towed. A blanket over the tow cable could have also saved his windshield.
Throw a blanket or even a some jackets over the line. If it snaps, it'll absorb most of the impact and even prevent it.
This can literally save a life.
This would work, sure. An even better approach is to just take a backpack, fill it with some heavy rocks from the ground nearby, and use that. It’s a quick and easy way to force the force downward, in the event of a line break.
At least the middle of the tow line or closer to the towing vehicle. Definitely not closer to the vehicle being towed.
You can't place too many blankets, towels, jackets over a line. If you're doing a lot of off-roading you should just get a winch dampening bag that can be filled with dirt, sand, etc.
Light stand bags (for photography and film) that can be filled with sand are very compact when empty and would work great for this purpose.
It's a legit way to do it if you use nylon straps, which are elastic. Then you can pull with some momentum, which applies way more force to the stuck vehicle than just pulling directly, especially on slippery ground.
BUT you have to manage recoil in case the strap breaks. This can be done for example by throwing several blankets over the strap, which basically act like parachutes in case the strap breaks and prevent the strap from whipping hard. And you should NEVER connect two straps together with a shackle when doing this, in my opinion.
Source: went mudding with my redneck friends many times in my teenage years.
It's crazy how calm everyone in the video is about it. That Jeep driver is really lucky to not be seriously hurt, and easily could have died. Everyone in both vehicles was at risk.
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u/Gibraldi 1d ago
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