For flatbed truck drivers: truck winches, winch straps and winch bars
By admin | July 25, 2010
Truck winches and winch straps mostly have been seen on flatbeds, a big chunk of flatbeds sold with winches installed, so the drivers only need to get winch straps to use with the winches, if they don’t have a winch bar they can get one from local store on online. A few different kinds of truck winches are available, most seen ones are slide in winches and weld on winches, to use slide in winches the flatbeds have to have rails installed at one side of the truck bed, and the sizes of the winches will be 2” or 4”, you will be able to use 2” or 4” winch straps with them respectively, of course you can put 3” winch straps in the 4” winches, but that’s not something you will see every day.
The concept of truck winches with winch straps are pretty straight forward, the component of both truck winch and ratchet that the tie down straps are inserted into for tightening the whole web tie down straps called mandrel, the mechanism to tighten the straps on truck winch is different than the self contained ratchets, you will need the help of winch bars to tighten the winch straps. The barrel across the winch body has holes at one end, a gear at the other end, the part between the winch body is mandrel, you can insert the webbing into it, close the brake on the gear will allow you the tighten the straps over the load, since the gear is only allowed to go one direction, When unloading your flatbed, you can open the brake on the gear, loose the strap a bit, get the hook off and retract the winch strap by turning the winch barrel the other way, when you are at it you will find it’s so easy, even…can dot it. In order to secure your load with winch straps, you will need winch bar to turn the barrel, there is no way you can operate the winch by hand, it’s not only not safe, but also not legal.
For your information, usually you can choose from 4 different kind of winch bar, the standard winch bars painted black, the chromated standard winch bars, chromated combination winch bars and combination winch bars painted half yellow. To be honest, all these winch bars are serving the exact same purpose, and it’s all about personal preference and sometimes people choose combination winch bars for specific reasons, one of them being that you can use something else with the combination winch bar, thus the word “combination” in the name.
