Tech Tip - Splice a Broken Winch Line

There are tons of advantages to switching to synthetic winch lines on your ATVs. Lighter weight, safer pulls, and best of all, instant repairs if you have a failure of your line while doing a pull. If you are caught with a broken line during a pull you can splice it back together in no time and be winching in 15 minutes or less and heres how.

All you need is a few simple tools and a couple sets of instructions in your toolkit.

Tools:

Sharp Scissors, or Blade
Electrical Tape
Sharpie Marker
Tubular Rope Fid about 1/2 the diameter of your rope line and at least 4-6 inches long



Formal Instructions:

Eye Splice

End Splice

First you need to measure out the length of your repair. I like to use 2 times the length of the tool that you are using to tread your taper tail down the center of the rope. Make a mark at one length, and a second mark at the second length. The second mark will be where you stick the tail thru your line at.



Now just past the 1st mark you made mark 3 pairs of rope to cut to make your tapered tail.



Pull those threads out of the line and cut them off.



Your tail should now look like this



The end of your rope should now have only six strands, instead of twelve. Take the end of your rope with 6 strands, and slip your fid thru the center of the rope and tape it to your fid.





Thread your taped fid thru your hook and back into the center of the rope, at your 2nd mark.




You now have a very large loop in the end of your rope. Push the end of the rope up through the middle of the rope. You'll need to kind of "bunch up" the rope to loosen it up enough to push the other rope through the middle.



As you bury more and more or the end of the rope, the loop will get smaller and smaller. Eventually you will have the loop very tight around the hook. Pull the end of the rope out so you can pull it nice and tight around the hook. Remove whatever object you taped to the end of the rope to guide it through, and pull the rope tight to re-bury the end. You may have to cut a little off the very end of the rope to get it all to re-bury itself. You have a completed eye splice.







After getting it tight around your hook, pull down and away from the hook on the outer wrap to lock the splice in place.

The end splice is exactly the same except that you now have to create two tapered tails and bury each tail into the two sections of winch line to create the splice. Just in case you break your line in the middle of a pull.

With a little patience you can repair any line in minutes.