How to Use a Ratchet Strap - Tips and Tricks!

Hi, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Thanks for joining me on this fast-paced walk through the world of the ratchet strap. Stick with me and I'll show you in just a few minutes four great things you need to know to successfully use these handy devices. Number one, I'm going to show you how to correctly thread it and set it up so it'll work flawlessly. Number two, I'm going to show you common strap down techniques that'll help you secure all those loads that you're going to be hauling in your trailer or your truck. Number three, I'll pass on to you some great viewer tips that have been sent in to us by our viewers about the things they're doing to make these work harder. And number four, just in case you fouled one of these up and it's all wadded up, I'm going to show you how to undo it and get back to work. Are you ready to go? Strap on your seat belt. Here we go. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We've got a lot to cover about this, so let's get to work. But before we get started, can you do me a favor? If you find this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel. And when you do, ring the bell because that way you'll be notified approximately every Friday of another great video episode that's coming out about product reviews, shop skills, homeowner skills, Maggie's Kitchen, and all sorts of things about the yard and the garden. All right, well, let's get to work. We've got a lot to cover. So here you've got a standard type of ratchet strap, and this is a medium-duty or light-duty strap that's commonly used around the home and for, you know, RV vehicles and those kinds of things where you're trailering recreational vehicles and motorcycles, that sort of thing. These are not to be used in commercial settings, but they're really handy for us homeowner types. Well, let's get to work. The first thing you need to understand, there's two parts, and this end right here is the ratchet component. Now, one of the things that really happens a lot is people don't know, do we lay it out like that or like this? Is it like that or like this? Well, there's a really easy way to remember this. Imagine that this is just your arm, right? So do you walk around, when you reach for something, do you reach like that or do you reach like that? Like this? Or do you just put your hand out? Well, you do it like this, right? Same thing with this. You're going to attach this to your attachment point. You're going to lay this open, okay? So let's have you come in a little closer and we'll set it up. Okay, so we're just going to kind of do a mock-up setup here, and as you can see, I've laid this open the way I said, with an arm like this, and I've just attached it over here to give me something to pull against, and we've done the same thing here. Now, the first thing you need to do is make sure you don't have any twists. So once you have this attached, just work the strap through your hand, just like that. Keep it flat so there's no twist. Once you've got the end here, this is how you set up the strap. Lift it, and if that slot right there is in the wrong place or it's hard to get to, just rotate this around like that until you can get it. Come from underneath the handle, not over the top. Underneath, feed through right there, and when you do, just push it up and pull through. Now, notice there's no twist because we took it out of it and we're setting it up. Now, just take this and go back home through the top. You've come through the bottom, through the slot, back out, and take out the slack. The biggest problem people do in fouling this is leaving too much right here, and then they start winding it up and they get a big wad that jams. So here, we're just going to take it like that. It's very clean. Tug to get a nice tension on it. You don't have to yank. We're going to let the strap do the work. Once you do that, then you're just going to take this handle to kind of close it, and then start rotating. Now, notice what happens. Just in a few partial turns, even with just a little bit, I'm putting an unbelievable amount of pressure. You can see how that's deflecting. It's really doing it, and look at here. I'm starting to get this already with just subtle pressure. So that is the first thing you're going to do right there. Now, to secure the latch, all you do, you don't have to do anything, just rotate it shut. Now, it's ready to go. Well, let's look at another common thing that happens right here. People let that just flop around in the wind, and depending where it is on the vehicle, on the trailer, whatever, this can get really dangerous. As a matter of fact, I have a family member that had one of this trail out the side, get to the drive shaft, snap, wrap up, snap, and then throw the hook back around and hit the back window of his truck while they're driving down the highway. It sounded like a bomb went off. Don't do that. It's dangerous. So what do you do with all this? Well, there's a lot of things, but here is a lot of different techniques out there. Here's my favorite thing to do. You're simply going to roll this up. All right, once you've got it to right here, give yourself a little slack. Here's the magic. You've got this right here. Give the slack, reach through, hold this, and grab the strap from underneath and just pull it through like that. Okay, let's do it again. It's like this. Just take a little bit of that strap below, push it up through, create a loop, and then roll that loop around everything. And when you do, and you pull, that's what you get. And that will not blow around. It cannot come undone. When it's time to undo it, simply pull this loop again to get the slack going, and reverse. Once you get it big enough, put the loop back through, and there you go. You're ready to go. How's that for cool? All right, now let's move to the next thing. All right, let's talk about how to undo this now. It's secure, but now it's time to undo the load. And I've already undone my security roll here, and I've got the tail ready to go. When it comes time to undo one of these, you're simply going to pull the handle, the release handle right here. All of them have something that is of this purpose. So you're going to grab that, pull it forward, and then open this all the way up. Now, when you did, you could see that starting to move right there a little bit. And all we're going to do is open, and there, did you see it release? That goes just like that, that rolled. Now, I'm going to tighten it back up and show you something. There you can see we've got tension on it. On an earlier video, I had one of these that was pretty sticky, and so it wasn't releasing. And you saw me reach in and kind of grab that along with this. Some of you went, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. That's dangerous. That thing lets go. That's not what it's designed for. The only place your finger should be is up here, and they're right. So if I've got that in tension, watch as I flatten it out, and watch that right there start to release. See it move back? And all of a sudden, I've taken tension off of this. I can literally start to move this back, and by pulling it this way, there, it all let go all at one time. Now, I can just pull that out, and then I can stow these. And I'll show you stowing these in just a little bit. Okay, let's go to the next thing. Okay, let's talk about common load number one, where you've got something in the back of your truck or trailer. Let's suppose it's a stack of two-by-fours or whatever, and you want to strap it down. Well, there's a couple ways you can do that. If you notice, most of your trucks and trailers, all that, have some kind of attachment point. There's one there and one across the way on the other side of the bed, and we'd simply use the hooks on the end and hook onto those, go over the top, thread it the way we showed you, and do it that way. If you're using sheet goods like what we're using right here, I have a single piece of fiberboard masonite type of product here, and I'm going to strap this down. There's a couple ways. One, I can press it down if I've got a lot, but that doesn't take a lot of the forces here. I'm going to show you another technique in a moment. But you can use your tailgate, especially on these short bed trucks, eight foot's about two and a half inches past the down tailgate. So you can't just have it hanging out. You want to use your tailgate. So what you've done is, or what I've done, is run the strap around the underneath. I'm going to hook these two together right here, use them so they're opposing themselves, and I'm going to come back to my own hook right here, using the same technique we did before. In, back, pull to tighten, start your ratchet, and you've got it down. And then we can secure this if we need to, if you can see there isn't much there. So that is a quick downforce thing, okay? So that is a real quick way you can do this. However, let's suppose you have a stack of lumber, or it's kind of, you're afraid you're going to accelerate, everything's going to come back on you. Then what do you do to stop it from going forward? Well, here's a couple of great techniques that I'm going to show you. This one is first, just if you've got a short stack, let's suppose you've got a stack of sheet goods about that tall or a single piece. Here's the technique. We secure it flat this way, but we secure it so it's being forced against the front of the truck by using a large C-clamp, and you would tighten this to the sheet good. If you've got something that you want to make sure that you don't mar it, you can put a scrap block or something in there to stop it. I put it to the center and then use a single strap going from the side there, through the thread portion, back to the other side of the truck, and then cinching this forward, and then this cannot come out, okay? We're done with this, and this stops it from any lift. That's especially handy on single sheets like this. If you've got lots of sheet goods, then you don't have to worry about this being bent forward, but this all helps. So this is a great way to do it. Now, if you have a large stack here, I want you to take a look at this picture real quick and see the straps that are coming underneath. These two gentlemen, we rent, Dirt Farmer Maggie and I saw them at the Lowe's parking lot, and what they were doing was so brilliant, I asked if I could borrow their idea from them and pass it on to you. And what they've done is a similar setup to this, however, two straps. And when they go to load large amounts like this in their short bed utility truck, then what they end up doing is starting the strap here, crossing under and leaving the tail out, and then starting another one the opposite way, loading the vehicle, then bringing the straps under, and that one starts over there, comes up underneath, and then secures over there. That one starts over there, comes underneath, and secures back or up over the top. I'm sorry, it's underneath, and then over the top, and then secures there. And when you cinch those all down, it secures them both ways. It can't lift, and it is keeping it in the back here. Those guys are brilliant, and so I want to give credit where credit is due. All right, let's look at our next tip. If you constantly use your truck to haul sheet goods and lumber like we do, I got tired of trying to find my ratchet straps all the time, so I set up a little rig back here of just having a ratchet strap attached semi-permanently on both sides, ready to go to work at a moment's notice. I picked up these little canvas bags on Amazon, and I can stuff the whole thing right inside of them. And you'll see in a future episode, I'm building a stop rack or a divider in the back here, which will show that that'll actually get stowed on that, so all the gears are ready to go. But what I did here, these haven't actually come off. I've loosened this off because they're open hook. Instead of using the hook, I used the loop and using either a quick link like this, where you hook it like this and then put it in to there. I can now secure that, and that is ready to go all the time. Or I can use an actual carabiner that is like this type, where I can simply... Let's go ahead and take that off. I can use the carabiner, open the gate on it, boom, put that back here as well, and now that is ready to go to work all the time. So I have a set of these carabiners like this that are ready to go. Now, if you're going to use a carabiner, use the real deal. Don't use these kind. These are convenience ones for key fobs and keeping your goodies on the back of your backpack or whatever it might be. But if you notice right on this, it says not for climbing. Why? Well, the load rating on this is only about 125 or 150 pounds. And I'm telling you, you can really exert some weight on this just on the ratchet strap pressure, and then also the working load itself. On these, the strongest two points, there's that little bitty pin and that little bitty pin. These are not what to use. Instead, go up on Amazon, find the real deal. This is a threaded one that stops. That can open there. But if I thread it forward, it's locked. The gate is locked. And the back shaft or the spine here, this D shape is set so that any load moves to in line closely to the spine. And you'll see all of these are in kilonewton ratings. 25 kilonewtons. Oh, it's probably over 5,000, 5,500 pounds. Way north of two tons of weight that this can hold. These are the real deal. So gear up. Doesn't cost that much. Use the real thing. May I throw in a free tip real quick? No extra charge for this, okay? I want you to notice these two different ratchet straps. Now, this one, the center right here barrel is made of two curved bars. So it actually looks like an upside down smile and a frown versus, notice this type, two half bars flat. What's the big difference? Well, notice if you try to feed a thread, a web through that, your strap through it back here, that as it enters, that bar is not in the center, but it tends to want to follow that curve and roll up. And sometimes I'll end up, especially as the end of these start to curl a little bit, trying to work to get those through. These are to be avoided. They don't really work that well. More and more I'm seeing have this flat bar. Again, the keeper's not in the center, but when you go to slide in, even if there's a curl, it forces it to go straight through. Look for this type. Avoid that type. Here's something else you need to know. Sharp edges, and this is a moderately sharp edge, are the mortal enemy of this strapping. So anything you can do to soften the radius of where strap crosses product, cargo, anything that's sharp edge is to use something that softens the edge. And these are little packing corners that show up in many products when you buy products online. And if you put that down first and then strap over it, you're really protecting the strap. You can do little sections of this. Another approach is to simply fold up a shop rag, washcloth, a towel. Some people have actually got shipping corners that have got those radiuses. You can get them from truck stops in their truck driver supply area. But anything you do to protect that strap is going to really give you longer life with the strap. Also, don't leave these laying around out in the weather because sun will degrade them. They'll get soft or get brittle. So then keep them stowed safely and they'll work a lot longer. Okay. As promised, I'm going to show you how to unfoul one of these. And what I mean by that is when so much strap here is wound around the central hub, that's jamming against all the elements here and you can't get the thing to release. So we've learned to release, you have to open it all the way up like this. And when you do, by tilting that up, it lets go. So that's the first thing. Make sure you're doing that, that you're changing the angle of attack on that so that whole thing comes loose. If that doesn't work, and you now have this big old wad there that you can't unspool, then let's go ahead and build a wad up here. And we're going to show you how to undo it. Now, first of all, how does it happen? It happens, here's that prevention part. If I leave way too much slack over on this side of it, and I'm just going to count on the ratchet strap to use up all of that, okay? And then, you know, I'm not going to pull tight to begin with. I'm just going to let it try to use up all that, okay? So let's see what happens when I do that. We're going to go ahead and start winding up over here. Okay, I'm using up all that strap, but I want you to notice something right here. Notice that I am winding back onto there, both the tail and the load side right here, at the same time onto this central hub. And look how it grows really quickly. And finally, what happens is, I get so much material on it that it runs out of space inside, and I still haven't used it all up. So then I think, well, I got to keep going here. And then what happens is, I'm telling you, I'm already running resistance here. I'm now getting some pressure. But this thing is kind of all, there's way too much material all over this hub here. So don't start with that much. Now, if you've got one like this, and it doesn't want to let go, then what you're going to have to do is literally start pushing material, pushing this back in, and then over-cranking this as wide as you can get, and start tugging on this. And when you do, see it there? It started to release. There we go. Tug on this, not on that. That gets on the outside of the roll. And there we go. Okay. All right. Now we've got it coming out. And you're able to unfoul it. I'm going to go ahead and do it again, just to see. Now I'm at this point right here, and it still doesn't want to let go. So I'm just going to start manually pushing it until I can get the back strap to come back through. And when I do, what do you know? I'm done. And now I can undo it. If this has been really, really overextended, the frames are bent, this is all rusted, you can try to put some WD-40 or some kind of lubricant on it to let it go. If it is just so wadded up and tightened that you can't get it loose, friend, it is time to invest another $8 to $15 to buy a new set of four. And there you have it. There's some great tips and techniques how to make these little babies work really hard for you. If you found this video to be helpful, would you like it better yet? Subscribe, ring the bell when you do so that you get notified approximately every Friday of great videos like this that tell you how to be an excellent homeowner, to put your hands on things, just do it for yourself in the kitchen, out in the shop, in the yard, and great product reviews. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay with DirtFarmerJay.com.