Factor 55 Blog

TBT. What’s it like to be a co-driver for racing champion Dan Fresh at King of The Hammers? Take a look at the co-driver helmet cam video from Fox Racing’s Mike Kim during the King of the Hammers UTV race. In this case, Mike created a rock anchor linking several Factor 55 Extreme Duty 20 inch soft shackles together. He had these soft shackles strapped to the roll cage for quick access during the race using the Factor 55 Strap Wraps. Why do racers prefer using USA made recovery gear? Predictable performance derived from USA tested materials. There simply is...

Take a look at a photo that one of our readers sent in. This is a case of poor structural design from a cheap imported bumper company. In this case, the shackle tabs were simply welded to the thin skin of the bumper without any structure on the inside to provide a load path to supporting structures like the frame rails or frame cross member. As we all know, shackle tabs can be exposed to tremendous momentary loads when yanked on with a kinetic rope, etc.. Proper recovery points need to transfer the pulling load through the bumper and to...

For those of you that are curious as to whether the addition of a Rope Guard product will add any overall strength to a FlatLink E winch shackle mount, well we tested this and there is an approximate gain in strength of 2-3000 pounds. At 42,000 pounds, the breaking strength of the FlatLink E is already overkill for winches up to 16K capacities, but for the curious, the breaking strength will approach 45,000 pounds when equipped with a riveted on Rope Guard. Compare this to a common steel hook average breaking strength in the 18-22K range and you can see...

Is laboratory destructive testing of vehicle recovery products important? We think it is and openly share our test results with the public. It’s how we built our highly engineered brand over 9 years ago and we continue this practice today. Although Finite Element Analysis can oftentimes get close to predicting the structural behavior of a product, especially getting close to the ultimate breaking strength, the yield point (plastic deformation – permanent distortion) of materials is a bit harder to predict. When we test our products, we measure critical dimensions prior to applying loads and remeasure these points after each test...