Vehicle Recovery Equipment

---

From our earliest beginnings, Wet Tech Rigging have been producing quality vehicle recovery equipment, including (but not limited to!) equaliser bridles, kinetic recovery lines, winch lines, soft shackles and recovery ring assemblies.

We are not trying to compete with the mass-produced / import market; rather utilising high quality, independently tested cordage and components from reputable marine-industry suppliers to produce some of the best quality kit you will find.

We currently offer a range of simplified finishes / lengths / strengths for purchase directly off our online store, however as all of our gear is made to order right here in Australia it is fully customisable upon request.

If you would like more information about any of the products available in our store or would like to discuss a custom application, please don't hesitate to Contact Us for friendly and honest advice.

Of particular interest is our extremely popular range of Equaliser Bridles, see our fact sheet below for more information.

Wet Tech Rigging's Equaliser Bridle is by far our most popular vehicle recovery offering, and although relatively simple in construction, requires a bit of science to clearly define the Minimum Break Load (MBL).

Equaliser bridles are fantastic for distributing a recovery load over multiple vehicle anchor points, but it is often ignored that the nature of the bridle arrangement means that when an appropriate anchor separation / bridle length ratio is achieved the bridle capacity can far exceed the in-line capacity of the strop itself.

As an example, take our 12T MBL equaliser bridle.  We have independently tested the spliced in-line MBL of the strop to be 12T.  Applying simple trigonometry allows us to calculate the bridle MBL for a given strop MBL, length and separation.

For a 3.0m length bridle and a vehicle anchor separation of 2.0 metres, applying the in-line MBL of 12T introduces a bridle leg load load of only 8T. To introduce 12T into each bridle leg, an actual applied load of 17.9T would be required. 

Hence, for a 3.0m length bridle with a tested in-line strop MBL of 12T operating at a separation of 2.0 metres, the actual bridle MBL is 17.9T.

For an identical strop length and capacity, but with anchor separation reduced to 1.5m yields an MBL of 20.8T. With separation increased to 2.5m, an MBL of 13.3T is achieved. 

An identical anchor separation of 2.0m, but shorter strop length of 2.5m yields an MBL of 14.4T. With a longer 4.0m strop length and 2.0m separation, MBL increases to 20.8T.

It should also be noted that at obtuse bridle angles (i.e. strop length and anchor separation near-equal), the leg load may actually increase above the applied load. For a 2.2m bridle, at a separation of 2.0m, the bridle MBL would in fact be lower than the strop MBL, reducing to 10T.

It can be seen that assigning an MBL to this particular product is near impossible, and can only be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Download a sample bridle calculation here, which can be tailored to your exact geometry.

As a general rule-of-thumb, bridle length-to-anchor spacing ratios should never exceed 1.25 to avoid a bridle MBL exceeding the tested strop MBL, and ratios of 1.5 and above are encouraged which may see an increase upwards of 150% of the in-line spliced strop MBL.

The higher the length-to-separation ratio, the higher the capacity of the bridle.