Keeping Secure and Tight With Ratchet Straps

1. Keeping Secure and Tight With Ratchet Straps

2. Introduction If you’ve never worked in any sort of hauling business or used your own trailer or pickup truck before, then you might be having trouble knowing what to do with your ratchet straps, or where their best practical uses are. Stored in those bands of polyester mesh and steel clamps is a level of security for your cargo that is, for how easy they are to use, far beyond any other alternative method of securing cargo. Hopefully by going over some of the basics and what different purposes they serve, you’ll have a better idea of what to do with them moving forward.

3. Table of Contents • The Fundamentals • Securing Cargo • Moving Vehicles • Important Things to Remember

4. The Fundamentals • Essentially, a ratchet mechanism allows something to move in a single direction, but bars movement on the other. A ratchet strap does this by employing the combination of two pawls and the gear. One of the pawls, the manual pawl, is the one that will inform you about the current status of the ratchet. • If the ratchet is in an L-shape, it indicated that you can begin working the manual pawl to tighten the ratchet. If the ratchet looks closed up, with the manual pawl touching the polyester mesh, then it’s in a locked position. If it’s flat and open, it’s in the loosening position.

5. The Fundamentals • Feeding the line through the ratchet can be a little trickier to explain, though there are many resources available online demonstrating the process. • Also, one final note on the basics, be sure to pick a ratchet strap that will actually be able to handle the job you are giving it. All ratchet straps have a variety of ratings that dictate what kind of weight they are capable of securing. This is especially important because the range of weights that different ratchet straps can fasten is enormous, from cheaper straps that can only do a couple of hundred pounds, all the way up to expensive industrial straps that can do thousands.

6. Securing Cargo • The most obvious usage of a ratchet strap is to secure cargo. Using a ratchet strap to do this will ensure that you are using a tried and tested method of securing your goods. Ratchet straps have been around for an incredibly long time and still not replaced for good reason, they do the job they are meant to and they do it well. • In a lot of the industries that use ratchet straps for hauling cargo, such as professional truckers, they will be used in combination with some form of tie-down strap. It’s one of the most common types of ratchet strap, especially if you own something like a pickup which has fastening points for a J-hook tie-down strap.

7. Moving Vehicles • Another popular job of the ratchet strap is securing vehicles to trailers. Ratchet straps in particular are so effective at this for their ability to secure otherwise moving parts in a vehicle, thanks for their flexible nature. It should be a testament to how versatile and strong the ratchet strap actually is that transporters and owners of the vehicles are happy to have the ratchet strap doing the bulk of the fastening.

8. Important Things to Remember • One of the worst offenders by far is having the ratchet straps in a position where they can rub against something sharp or something that will corrode the strap. If the strap is ratcheted tight like it should be, you risk the strap being worn away over the course of the journey as the load moves around. • Check that your straps are DEFINITELY secure! Be sure to give the straps a firm pull to ensure that there’s no way they can move. You should do this after you have finished applying all the straps, just in case any of them have shifted from the tightening of the load.

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