"one thing that's interesting about the double lining is that I bet most people think it takes twice as long, but that's not true cuz the winch speed increases quite a bit if the load is halved. I bet the pull ends up being only marginally slower (of course respooling will take longer)."
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Not really. The relationship between your winch load and your winch speed is not linear. Don't forget to add in the leverage gain due to fewer wraps on the drum. Don't forget tot add in the friction of the snatch block(s). Keep in mind that unless the lines out and back are truely parallel, you are not getting a true 2:1 advantage.
And if you have a PTO winch with 4 speeds available and a throttle to control winch speed, regardless of load, the whole speed/load thing goes out the window.
With any serious winching task, the time needed has nothing to do with how fast the winch pulls. It is all about rigging, tasks done during the pull (shoveling muck from under the rig as it is winched, jamming debris under the tires to get them up and rolling, working the throttle of the rig being winched so as to let it's tirs do some of the work, repositioning gear/rehooking lines, stopping the whole project to re-coordinate or change some detail... lots of stuff like that), and of course cleaning up and restowing afterwards.
We had a winchout a couple of seasons back that took five hours to get a single rig out. We had a poorly maintained PTO fail (which of course meant re-rigging with another rig), had to double line the entire time to two recovery rigs, had to drag the stuck rig a full 50 feet because it kept plowing under the tundra instead of riding up on top, had 6 guys working shovels, had to partially tunnel and crawl under the vehicle and attach the rigging to the rear axle instead of the frame, had two highlifts at a time set up several different times while winching, had to run the cable over an 8 foot long 4x4 with four guys fighting the attached straps to keep it aligned, had to un-invert both rear shackles after the got the rig out and nearly bent both rear springs... I forget what else we had going on. Oh yeah, we had freezing rain coming down for at least 3 of the 5 hours.
When we were done, it took a total of 3-4 minutes to free the other rig which we had cone for in the first place!
When everything is said and done, winch speed is not that imoprtant in the overall scheme of things. I almost never use the speed that I can get from my PTOs.
Mark...
IIRC, that was mud, not sand too!
