One of the things I don’t like about my truck is that it has terrible tires. Just terrible tires. I have been in a few situations where I was sitting there thinking “I shouldn’t be stuck right now.”
After my last experience of trying to haul wood out by hand, I thought I would bring the truck down a bit and fill it with some firewood and drop it off at the new location. If that worked, I would try doing some log skidding with the truck. Seems pretty straight forward. Hook up the logs to the truck, then haul it out.
The incline out of the area below the shed is a little steep, but it wasn’t by any means treacherous. I brought the truck back and filled it with about 200 lbs (90 kg) of wood. So, for a 3/4 ton truck, thats nothing. There was also about 150 lbs of IBU tank in the back, also not that much for a truck like that.
However, when I went to pull forward, stuck. Backed it down the hill a bit and gunned it…. still stuck. I got out and looked at the tires and saw that they were completely packed full of dirt and so I was basically driving with slicks. Bringing tow truck out would be last option possible, but I did have an idea. I have compiled a small arsenal of recovery gear from the times I lived in Colorado. In this case, I figured I might be able to use a recovery strap. Think of a bungie cord, but this bungie cord is 30 foot (9 meters) long, and has a 24,000 lb capacity. So, I hooked up my V60’s hitch to a shackle hitch receiver.
This is my receiver hitch, shackle, doo-hickey thing. Obviously, I haven’t used it yet before this, and you can see all my other shackles attached to it. Anyway, this end just goes into the car, and the other side goes into the recovery points on the front of the truck. Here it is all setup (after I had already been working on freeing it for a while from the lower parts).
The problem was, I was doing this solo. So my idea was:
- Pull the strap tight with the car (really tight).
- Stop, set the emergency brake. Let the car be the anchor.
- Get over to the truck, release the emergency brake.
- Go into reverse. Let gravity stretch the strap even more.
- Ensure the truck is in 4×4 low.
- Place it into drive.
- Release the brake and gun it.
The recovery strap would, draw me forward like I was on a rubber band. Between that and gunning the truck in 4 wheel drive, it would get me about 2-3 foot each time I did this. Then I would go back to the car, and drive it forward again. Eventually the truck came out of the low area.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. I hate the tires on that truck.
Vantages From Vandalia 