How to Use a Ratchet Strap

hey kids so it's tool tuesday and today i'm gonna show you how to use a ratchet strap uh it's great for tying down loads um and actually i'm gonna actually have my brother rick show you how to do it i had mentioned that i was gonna start including including him in some future videos and uh yeah that's going to open up all kinds of possibilities for us because rick uh rick was a he's retired now but he was a journeyman um cabinet maker so he knows how to use all kinds of kinds of tools so that'll help us build content for this channel so um but before i do that i have a dad joke for you so i was going to tell you a joke about time travel but you guys didn't like it so um also i want to um bring up rick so i tell you a little bit of history there i mentioned in my previous video but in case you hadn't watched that so um when i was 14 you know i come from a fractured home you've probably heard a little bit of the story but i uh when i was 14 um i was either going to go live in a in a foster home or i was going to have to live with one of my siblings and rick stepped up rick was newly married at the time um to karen and he was 23 and she was 24 and they lived in a small trailer uh i shouldn't say a small trailer but it was a trailer and i've always called it a mobile home but really it was a it was a glorified trailer and you know they took me on and i'm forever grateful um for that they're my heroes um and rick has helped me um in so many different ways uh even you know becoming a man rick helped me uh not only with learning how to do things around the house but uh just a lot of things i've learned a lot from rick um and um another thing about him is he uh he's a cancer survivor so he had leukemia about uh about 10 years ago he he got it and then it was touch and go for a while you know it was a little scary and there was uh times yeah that i just wasn't sure if we were gonna if he was gonna be around but thankfully my brother dawn uh donated his stem cells and then rick has since made a full recovery and just recently i think it was about a month ago maybe a little bit longer ago but um he got the official word that he had beaten this thing so he's a cancer survivor and so anyway very cool i'm really proud of him and uh yeah without further ado here's rick uh hi i'm rob's brother rick and he asked me if i would uh demonstrate how to use a ratchet strap and i have to kind of figure these things out each time anyway and i'm sure you can too there once you get the the hang of them they're they're pretty easy and they're really secure so they're good to use here we go you're going to have a long strap all right and then you're also going to have your short strap although some of these come with a longer lead it's kind of nice if it was a little bit longer lead and i'll show you why a little bit later but anyways what we're going to do right now is uh hook it to that and tighten it down but to start with what you want to do is kind of whoops i kind of went too far work work this thing uh this little notch around until it's kind of in the middle facing sideways like that because it's easier to put the strap through it than if it was the other way and you'll see what i mean by that so i'll put the strap through and then bring it back right just going through that hole then coming back and then in this case we'll we're hooking these two hooks against each other okay so now you got like that and you want to pull all the strap or all the slack out okay and then you start cranking because if you don't pull the strap all the slack out of that it'll be up you've taken in all the slack and it's going to make a big balled up mess right in there and it's going to make it harder to take apart later on so get it to where it's tight nice and tight then just fold that back down you got a lot of extra strapping there just kind of do you can do a series of of half hitches like that that kind of uh help to kind of secure it you know so you don't have something flapping all over but anyway you want to take care of that so that isn't flapping down the road with you and then to undo it just pull on that left push up on that lever again right there and then you pull it all the way down and you just kind of push it where you're breaking its back where you're pushing it straight and then that releases all the tension on it and you just pull it out from there okay to make it easier to slide this strap through here you want to take that ratchet and if you slid through there now then you gotta kind of fish it around through there so if you just kind of work that around to where it's sideways oops i went too far there you go sideways then you can come come in the side and it comes right out and you're doubled over just like that hey it's been my privilege to to show this to you thanks for watching um i hope this helps and god bless you guys so i hope you enjoyed that and i hope you enjoyed learning from him as much as i have over the years he's a great guy and it just expands what we're able to cover on this channel because he's a wealth of information when it comes to things that i don't necessarily know about so um anyway thanks for watching and god bless you