Factor 55 Blog

A shout out to our friends over at King County Search and Rescue. Whenever people find themselves in imminent danger or distress, SAR organizations like this are ready to respond. This is a 100% volunteer organization serving its local community with Search and Rescue services along with Education. Take a look at some pictures from this past weekend in Greenwater, WA where they put on a Vehicle Recovery Clinic. In addition to basic safe vehicle recovery techniques, the instructors were also demonstrating the use of snatch blocks along with our new lightweight Rope Retention Pulley alternative for synthetic winch lines. SAR...

There are no shortcuts to proper product development; the new Load Distribution Plate product is a good example. Although we lab and field tested our products ourselves, we also rely on trained professionals to test and provide feedback on product performance. Our product design usually requires 3 interations:  1. ENGINEERING PROTOTYPE – followed by testing, data interpretation, and design improvements. 2. PREPRODUCTION PROTOTYPE – followed by smaller iterative changes as well as further internal and field testing and data interpretation. 3. PRODUCTION – followed by QA and test/performance validation. Test, retest, test again. Many of us may never need to...

Some of you have recently asked how to tell what force your winch is actually applying to your rigging and vehicle. The truth is it’s hard to tell without the correct measurement instruments. Usually we can simply estimate the loads based on your winch capacity, what layer of rope you are on etc.. It’s best to be conservative by estimating the load on the high side of your approximation. However, when we are out field testing, we need a more accurate method to measure the actual loads on our recovery gear. We use a rechargeable load cell (or strain gauge)...

Thanks for your patience on this. Here is the video of our soft shackle knot position test that many of you asked for. As mentioned before, we take the average breakage data from many sample tests completed. This video is typical of a single sample test. The first test is of our 10 inch soft shackle with the knot positioned in the middle of the span and the second test is with the knot positioned against the rigging, in this case the oversized test bed steel hook.   In the first part of the video you will begin to notice...