Winch straps usually will be used with truck winches, and these straps come in 2” and 4” wide, the length usually measures from 20′ to 50′ even 60′ long, depends on different applications, people need different length. Winch straps can also be called flat bed straps, because most box truck use logistic straps, aka e track straps, only flat bed will have truck winches installed.
Winch straps can be used to tie down a lot different kind of loads, such as lumber, metal coil, log, paper roll, concrete pipe, etc. And winch strap assembly has webbing part and steel flat hook part, the webbing is made of polyester, the typical breaking strength for the strap is 15000lbs or 16200lbs, working load limit is 5000lbs or 5400lbs.
Winch straps are made of polyester webbing, because it’s applications require low elongation and low creep.
See the following pictures from both sides of the strap and the sewn point:
Winch Strap Front
Winch Strap Back
Winch Strap Sewn Point
When I choose ratchet straps, the most important thing I consider will be the quality of the product, ratchet strap assembly usually consists two parts, the ratchet buckle with fixed strap ending with flat hook, wire hook or chain extension, the long strap with hook or chain extension. The breaking strength is determined by the weakest part of the assembly, for instance, if the webbing has breaking strength of 12,000lbs but the ratchet buckle only has 10,000lbs, I say the assembly has breaking strength 10,000lbs. So we will need both the hardware and webbing to be strong and high quality.
When you shopping at local store, you can see and touch the strap and the buckle, and the look and feel can tell you a lot about the product, and you may have shopped there quite a few times to know the quality of their products, suffice to say, shop locally maybe a good choice. But there are times that we have to shop online, such as you can’t find a nearby store, or the local price is too expensive, or what you’re looking can’t be found in local store, then we have to go online to find what we need.
How do you tell which store has the best products? Here we have two major criteria, the first thing we should check is the online review of the store and it’s products, then we can look at the price to see if it’s competitive. Of course we all know the online review stuff, there are a few to consider, if the store offers google checkout, you can look for their google checkout review, and probably bizrate.com is a good place to find some reviews, and you can google around see if there is any negative or positive reviews. The price to easy to check, there are quite a few comparison shopping sites out there, such as nextag.com, pricegrabber.com etc., don’t just look at the price, take shipping charge into account, because cargo control products tend to be pretty heavy, the shipping will be a big part of the total price. Our goal is to find low price with free shipping.
I know it’s a tough job to find both low price and free shipping, fortunately I actually found one, www.mfrexpress.com offers free shipping for all orders $25 or more, which is quite amazing, consider they have nice reviews on Google Checkout, and they have more than 1100 all positives feed backs on ebay, I say they have quite nice products and prices. And they have quite large selection of ratchet straps as well, from 1”-4” and all kinds of length available, buy from this store maybe a good idea according to the reviews, prices and no catch free shipping(mostly USPS and Fedex).
If you have better choices please let me know!
