Does an Air Damper make a 4×4 Snatch Recovery safer?

Here I do some unauthorised testing to explore how to use an Air Damper in a Snatch Recovery. Please share this video to show anyone you know who needs to be kept safe during a vehicle recovery.

Snatch recoveries are one of the most dangerous ways we can recover a vehicle. So in this video, I’m going to explore ways that we may be able to make it a little bit safer. Share this video with anybody you know who may need to do a vehicle recovery. So here we have a single air damper with no weight in the middle third of the strap. Now I’m going to up it and I’m going to have two air dampers, no weight on the strap. Now, a single air damper with about five kilos of weight in the middle third.

And now, we’ll up it, two air dampers, five kilos of weight in each, and look at the result. Impressive.

Wow. Absolutely destroyed the air damper. But you know what? It stopped the bow shackle before it got to my recovery point. And I would rather destroy an air damper than destroy somebody’s life. So let me show you how we set up for that last demonstration. Firstly, each air damper had about five kilos of gravel inside the pocket. Second, we put this air damper as close to the [inaudible 00:01:20] bow shackle as we could. Now in my demonstration, I actually had a fuse there. You’re obviously not going to do that.

Down the middle third here, as per most four wheel drive training manuals, I’ve always advocated that you put an air damper in the middle third, and that would give you a safe recovery. I actually don’t know that that’s the correct advice, and I think we actually need to consider putting an air damper at each end as well, as per the demonstration today. So I would suggest the safest recovery is going to be three air dampers loaded with about five kilos of gravel in each air damper, and that’s going to give you a good result. But you decide. I’m MadMatt. Stay safe on the trails.