Tow Straps Are Not Tow Bars!

Tow straps are great tools for short-range, emergency towing jobs. But they’re all that great for long-distance towing jobs — by which I mean anything more than “across the block”. You certainly wouldn’t want to try to cross down with just a tow strap connecting your defunct vehicle with a functional one.

The reason for that is simple: tow straps don’t protect the towing vehicle from the towee. That means every stop sign, stop light, brake light, raccoon in the road, sneeze, and butterfly is another chance that the person in the towee car might miss the brake and put a big ol’ dent in the back of your car.

Don’t get me wrong — tow straps are excellent tools to have; I keep one in the back of my truck in the toolbox that holds my snatch strap, my recovery strap, my tie down straps, and a few other straps that you don’t need to know about. My friends call me at least once a month with the latest story of how their car got stuck there, because they know I can get them out and functional again.

The other major thing that separates a tow strap from a tow bar is the need for a driver in the first place. Correctly installed, a tow bar ‘steers’ the towee for you. Tow straps require the existence and use of a licensed driver in the towed vehicle, ready and able to turn the wheel as well as apply the brakes. That can be a pretty disconcerting job given that, if you’re being towed by a very large vehicle, your view will consist almost entirely of that vehicle’s rear end.

Compare that to a tow bar, where having a passenger is the towed vehicle isn’t just unsafe, it’s actively illegal in most states! The tow bar does the work of the passenger, and if someone does happen to be in the other vehicle and they turn the wheel while you’re driving down the road, they could cause a major accident.

Finally, there’s the issue of safe speed. A tow bar will allow you to travel around 45 mph without much danger to either vehicle. A tow strap limits you to about 20 mph. Any faster and the rear driver won’t have the reaction time to turn and brake fast enough to prevent harming the towing vehicle.

Tow straps are much cheaper, much easier to use, and much easier to store — they definitely have their place. Just know the limitations of the tools you have on hand, and be safe.

How to Buy a Ratchet Strap

Ratchet straps are one of a few different kinds of tie down straps used to secure things to the inside of a moving truck or the back of a pickup or flatbed. In short, its a normal polyester strap with hooks on either end, but it’s not a mechanism in the middle that ratchets the strap onto a spool, shortening it more with each crank of the mechanism.

The end result is that you get a strap that is almost perfectly snug to the item being secured, and is held more tightly than any amount of human muscle could manage. Whether you’re making sure a grand piano doesn’t roll around inside your U-Haul or you’re stacking a pallet of computers to the back of a pickup to take to your local elementary school, ratchet straps are the tool for the job.

Generally speaking, a one inch wide polyester strap is perfect for attaching things that have a weight and bulk about equivalent to a human being. A two-inch strap can handle larger objects like motorcycles. Three-inch straps can hold a car onto the back of a flatbed. Four-inch straps are used for moving giant pieces of machinery like parts of oil drilling rigs, or halves of double-wide mobile homes.

Of course, you need to worry about the length as well. In order to properly use a ratchet strap, you need about 3 feet more strap than it takes to get from one anchor point to the next. That’s to give the ratchet mechanism plenty to wind up on.

Also, take a close look at the break weight of your ratchet straps (and the ratchet itself). Generally the break weight on a strap might be between 2 tons for a 1-inch strap and 40 tons for a 4-inch strap. That sounds like a lot, but consider this: if you take a really sharp corner at a decent speed, you can easily generate 3 ‘g’s of sideway force. That means that your merely 1200 pound motorcycle might suddenly “weigh” 3600 pounds for those few seconds that you fly around the corner! For that reason, it’s important to buy a strap that has a break weight at least four times greater than the actual weight of your load.

It’s Ratchet Straps for People New to Hauling Loads

There are two kinds of ratchet straps in the world — the kind that plumbers use to keep their ratchets in place, and the kind that movers use to ratchet a strap tightly enough that whatever’s being strapped down won’t move. Guess which one is more interesting?

A ratchet strap is the perfect form of tie down strap for an inexperienced mover or trucker. Generally, such an individual will have to choose between strapping their goods down with ratchet straps, cam straps, winch straps, or just plain rope. The last is a joke.

Here’s the skinny. Every tie down strap is made of polyester webbing. Some other straps are made of nylon so that they’re stretchy; tie down straps aren’t supposed to be stretchy, and polyester combines non-stretchiness with extraordinary strength, so it’s the substance of choice. The ratchet on a ratchet strap is significantly stronger than the webbing itself, so it won’t give out, either.

You could try to use cam straps, but they have a fatal flaw: you have to pull them tight with Muscle Power(tm), and they can come loose in the course of normal everyday driving over a bumpy road. They’re not bad, but if you’re transporting something really valuable, you don’t want to take the chance that your goods will slide around or come undone.

You could try to use winch straps to get around that problem — but the winch sits at one end of the strap, meaning you have to have something to attach the winch to. That can be problematic if you’re not a welder and you don’t want to drill bolt holes in the bottom of your truck.

Ratchet straps form the perfect midline, giving you the same kind of mechanical tightening ability that a winch has, but taking up space on the strap itself. That means they can be used in almost any situation and they deliver the service you need without a fuss.

Whether you’re a civilian trying to make it cross-country in a U-Haul or a newbie trucker trying to figure out how to secure a load with a minimum of mucking about, fall back on ratchet straps — they’re the right tool for the job.

When and Where to use Recovery Straps and Tow Straps

If you pay for towing insurance, you might very well be able to save yourself quite a chunk of change in the long run by simply purchasing a good quality recovery strap and a good quality tow strap to keep in your vehicle. (Don’t confuse these with tie down straps; the three all look similar but have very different purposes.)

If your car or truck gets stuck in a ditch, all you need is a friend with a vehicle and a recovery strap to get it out. The first thing to do is to find an anchor point on each vehicle — most modern vehicles have a hook somewhere on the chassis under the bumper that will allow you to hook the loop of a recovery strap. Once the two are connected, have the tower accelerate slowly but firmly away from the stuck vehicle.

The recovery strap will stretch — it’s supposed to — and then it will ‘snap back’. Because the tower is still accelerating away, it will transfer the kinetic energy swiftly but gently onto the stuck vehicle, pulling it firmly but without a ‘jerk’ out of its predicament.

If the stuck vehicle is SO stuck that it’s functional mass is greater than the mass and the acceleration of the tower, you might have a problem — but that’s not terribly likely. Should you find yourself in that position, there are still options — find an offroading store and buy yourself a ‘snatch strap’; they’re the best bet for really unsticking the really stuck.

Once the towee is unstuck, the recovery straps can go away, and the tow straps can come out. The tow strap is a short-term tool, not to be used to lug a car across the country. Instead, use it to get it to a place where it can drive home under it’s own power — or just to get it home if it’s immobile on its own. You’ll need one person driving in the towed car, mostly to apply the brakes at each stop light so it doesn’t crash into the towing car.