Bulldog Winch Big Dog Kinetic Recovery Rope - 1-1/2" x 30' - 21,000 lbs

Video Transcript for Bulldog Winch Big Dog Kinetic Recovery Rope Review BDW20314

Randy: Hey, guys. Randy here at etrailer.com. Today we're taking a look at a massive recovery rope from Bulldog Winch. This rope is rated for 63,000 pounds of brake strength, 21,000 pounds for vehicle recovery, and essentially what we have is in 30 foot nylon rope. As we put tension on it, unlike the tow straps that are out there, it's gotten 25% flex, or 25% give in it. Now not only is that stretch going to make it much easier on both vehicles involved, the one doing the recovering and the one needing to be recovered, but it also gives us a little bit of an advantage in actually getting the vehicle unstuck.Now this one, we just ran it out here enough to get it stuck.

It's not really bogged down, but you get a lot of suction force when a vehicle gets stuck in deeper mud and essentially you need that spring action, so as this stretches, it then wants to come back, it then wants to kind of pull itself back and that elastic force helps to spring that vehicle out of the hole it's in.Comparing this to a standard tow strap, it's worlds better. It gives you much smoother, like we said, on each side and helps to pop it out of there. Generally, this is going to be the way to go. Now, with the Jeep we have here and we've got an Envoy that we got stuck, these are going to be about as small of a vehicle as you'll want to put on this. I think this size rope is going to be better suited for really large vehicles.

21,000 pounds of safe working load limit or recovery force, it's going to be a lot. Three quarter tons, one tons, and larger trucks I think is what you'll see this used on mainly. For like the Jeep and the SUV, they have a 7/8 inch diameter, which I think would be really good. If you get up into kind of lifted trucks or deeper mud where you need a little bit more force, there's an inch and a quarter that's available. I think those would be better suited in that application.

For your heavy duty trucks, though, this is definitely going to be the way to go.This is nylon feels really nice. It's very durable. I don't foresee any real wear issues or anything like that. This would be something that you can have for an extremely long time and really not have to worry about it.So even with the lighter vehicles, we didn't get the full stretch out of it, but I could definitely tell it was much smoother when it came taut, and it did give us just enough spring effect to pop them right out of there with little effort from the Jeep. We used the energy that we already had instead of having to floor it to get it out of there.A couple of other things that I like about this recovery rope is on the ends we do have a high vis section there just so we know where each end is.

Also helps us not to leave it behind. I mean, this is some pricey investment. It's going to do a lot of good work for you. You just don't want to leave it out on the trail.We also have a strap here, kind of help us bunch it up. This is going to make it much more easy to get it in our bag once we're done using it. So just bring that around, we want to compress it as much as possible. Then we'll just use that hook and loop to secure it.All right, guys. Well, we we're able to get it back in the bag, but this thing is really at max capacity here. The bag's pretty durable. The zipper was able to close fully on it, but I'm not convinced everybody's going to be sticking it back in this bag every time after you use it, and I'm not sure how long that bag's going to hold up. I think the best bet with this deal is going to be wrapping it up with our strap and then sewing it in our tow vehicle, our recovery vehicle. Most other tow straps and stuff like that, that's the way they're stored, so I imagine you'll be doing the same thing with this one.Now, while it's harder to see between two vehicles, we're going to take a look at it with a fixed object. Basically we'll come taut on our towing strap, which is in my mind, designed for just towing a vehicle that's not stuck, and you'll see that abrupt stop that we get at the end of it versus when we switch over to the kinetic rope or the recovery rope. It gives us that stretch.We'll just do it at low speed. There's no need to hammer on it, but see once we get to the end there, there's just no flex and there's no give.As you can see, with that standard tow strap, it just pots at the end each time, and you can definitely feel it in the vehicle even when going as slow as what I was. We're going to hook up our kinetic rope now, and I expect that end to be much softer, not having that lurch forward quite as much, and it's going to give us up to 25% of stretch. It's a 30 foot rope. We'll pop it a couple of times and we'll make it taut, and then gas on it and see just how much stretch it really does have.All right. Now we'll try with our kinetic rope here. Yeah, there's was quite a bit of difference. It was a lot softer.As you guys can see, even with the Jeep here we we're able to get some stretch out of it. I think it went about three foot is about what we got out of the seven that would be available there with the 25%, so I think this is going to be best suited for those really big trucks, your deuce and a half, your one tons, your 450s, 550s. Think this is going to be ideal. I think you can maximize that stretch you're going to get out of it with those heavier trucks. Even with the Jeep, it was much more comfortable when we came to full length, and as it got taut, I could see this really coming in handy for those bigger applications for sure.