FINALLY - A Better Ratchet Strap!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Have we found the next generation of the ratchet strap? You know, the one that solves all those irritating problems like trying to thread the darn thing or to stop it from jamming with too much strap around the spool? Or how about keeping the hook fixed on the side of the load while you go to the other side? You know, it just keeps falling off. Is there a way to get it to stay? Or how about stowing the excess strap so it doesn't blow in the wind as you go down the highway? Or worse yet, get caught under your trailer tire or in your drivetrain and cause serious issues? We think we found a great product. Stay tuned and I'll tell you all about it. Now it's time to make use of the Omega strap. But the first thing I'm actually going to do is show you the regular style hook because you usually start loading your cargo and then starting the strap at the first attachment point, putting the strap over it going to the other side. And typically what happens is exactly this. All right, so you've got a hook like this that's open and you go and you put this on there and then pop this over the top and then walk away and then it drops over. And then you come back and you go, okay, let's see if I can get that. I'm going to throw that out there and hopefully I can keep it up and then it does that. And it's back and forth. You know, one video I suggested that you do this right here to solve it the problem is you're actually putting a lot of pressure right there if you're doing a high pressure load on where the hook is going to tend to open up instead of where it's going to grip the strongest. So this is clearly a point of irritation. Okay, so there's a better way. All right, let's use the soft hook on the Omega strap and see if we get a different result. So I go ahead and I put this on here. I take this around and wrap it around this a couple times to cinch it. And then I can walk away from it. And there you go. We've now set up this end, the ratchet or working end here. We've hooked it here. We've now laid it out and notice that whenever you laid out one of these straps, you always do it like this, like your arm. You lay it open like that. And now this is properly oriented for this strap to come up the next one. Now, looking over here, in reality, what we usually do, there'd be a piece of cargo here, a piece of equipment, whatever this is being threaded through to come to the ratchet strap. But we're just doing this for demo purposes. You'll get the idea. So here's our strap. And what we need is this end. So we're going to go ahead and play out the whole thing. And we're going to get this all open. And there is our end right here. Now that is ready to be put in to this section. And you can see the slot it needs to go in. But what's really confusing to most people is where to put the strap. Well, fortunately, right there, load strap or load slot this side. Well, notice something right there. That's not aligned where I can actually get that to go through it very easily. So what you can do is rotate that shut, and then rotate this and get it to the right place. And it actually stops there when you've got it the right place. Now you're going to take this, put it up through it, and go back away like that. And then go ahead and use up all of your excess. Okay. And there we are right there. Now, we are now ready to do that. And you can see that in my case, I loaded the strap over the top, back out the top. That works great. And it also works if you come out the bottom, as long as the strap comes in from the underside and goes back home from wherever it was being attached. Now, you've got this all set up. I mean, I'm cinching down, and I could cinch it some more if I wanted to. So there we've got that going. What do I do with all of this? Well, you can bundle it up. But here's something you can do with this. You can actually wind this right around this and do a complete spool. And if you have a lot of material like this, you're going to have to do it nice and slow. And if you look at their homepage at OmegaStrap, you'll see a nice demo of this. This is one way to do it, is to wind it up like this when you're completely done. And I don't want to use up your time to do that. Envision the rest of it's there. You're going to take this, and you're going to put that right over it and secure the whole thing so it's right there. So there that portion is. Now, if you don't want to do that, let me throw another tip in here really quickly, not to diminish what they've accomplished here. We showed this tip on another one. Let me spool this up. All right, when you get it down to this far and about this right here, you can take a loop, put it through the center like that, and then just simply bring the whole body of that through like this and pull it tight. And when you do, that's what you've got left. So whether you use the knob system here or you use this, no more flapping in the wind, which is really dangerous to have happen. Secured. Now, one other thing I want to point out about this knob, when you're done with the job, undoing this with that kind of tension, boy, can really get jammed and that sort of thing. So what you can do here is see that right there? Open that. Do not put your fingers down in here. You don't need to. You can bring it to here, grab on the knob, take off the pressure and release it slowly. And when you do, look at that. Everything's ready to come undone. You would just undo this, pull the strap out. All right, now the job's done. It's time to stow the gear and put it in condition so it's ready to use the next time you go to work. Nobody's got time to undo wadded up straps or try to set things up. A lot of times you're in a hurry when it's time to load up, or it might be in even an emergency situation. You want the gear ready to go. Well, there's two different approaches I found that you can use with this system. One, if you want to keep the component separate, and some of us like it that way, others want it integrated. The first thing you do is wind the strap up just like this, and then use the hook system itself to just reach through the core of that, that soft hook, and then cinch it down, and there you go. You've got a nice little wound up cord that's ready to go, or strap, on this end. On this end where you have the handle, you would simply close the handle, bring this around, use the integrated loop, and cover the entire thing. And now you've got a place that it's at least stowed and ready to go, and you can just put that in the bag. So there is a two-part system. The second way is to take the strap like this, go ahead and close the handle, and when you do, bring this hook over the top back towards home, I would call it, and then go ahead and get the end of the other strap here. So in this case, here it is. And what I do is, I start by going right through there like that. Let me do that one more time. You've got it laid over here like this, put it in here like this. What that does is help secure the hook so it doesn't fall out of the wind up. And now you're simply going to wind around it, tuck that tail in right there, get the wind out going around it, and let's wind it up. Pull it every once in a while to get it to kind of snug down around. All right, and when you come home, this is where this gets really handy. So you can simply go around the whole thing with this loop. And there you go, it's stowed. How's that for getting ready to go to work the next time? So what do you get when you purchase a set of ratchet straps from OmegaStrap? Well, you're going to get a nice mesh bag right off that the whole system comes in, along with a nice instruction manual, pictorial and detailed step-by-step. Simple, but the first time through, you probably want to learn a couple of features that you won't want to go back to the old way after doing this. You're going to get two ratchet strap heads that, of course, have the patented knob feature, along with the keeper cord that we've shown you how to make use of. And you're going to get two 15-foot ratchet straps with the keeper cables that allow you to trap an attachment point and not have this fall off. A really nice thing that they did is they threw in two of these soft straps here. And these soft straps make it really easy to, let's say, go around the handle of a piece of lawn equipment, like a lawnmower, or how about motorcycle handles, or some place that's an irregular place to attach where the hook would be too tight or too small. These really solve the problem. And you may notice when you look at this, one end has this twisted loop back where this is flat sewn itself. You know, is that a mistake? No, that's a design feature. And let me show you how this works. All right, so let's envision that this is a handlebar or a reinforcement bar on a piece of equipment, or maybe something you're tying down, a piece of furniture, or whatever. And so you're going to, the hook wouldn't have fixed very well on this. It'd slide up and down a bit, it wouldn't cinch real tight, or it may just be too fat. So in comes this strap. Now you have two ways to put it on there. One is the correct way, one is the incorrect way. The correct way is to put the flat loop through the twisted loop. And so when you do that and cinch it down, look what you get on there. And then coming out here, I can simply put the hook through here, and I now have a very secure attachment point. All right, let me give you a little bit of technical details about this system. When you buy these, you're going to get what is a fairly typical length. These are 15 foot, about three, about five meters in length, 600 pound working load, and 1,800 pound brake strength. For our international friends, I've put those specifications in the description below in kilo loads, okay? So that's the technical length on these. Where are these made? Well, they're made overseas. I had a spirited conversation with the inventor and the distributor of this system, who said there are no ratchet strap, at least for the extensive research and attempting to have his patented product manufactured here in the United States. The only place that he could find plants that built these were in China or in the Pan-Asian area. So unfortunately, at least for right now, these are manufactured offshore, and he insisted that all the other ones are also. When you see, you know, assembled in the United States, that sort of thing, from global components, that's code language for it was made offshore and distributed here. It is his aspiration to later bring this on over, but for right now, this is the only place that he could find his product with these patented features made over in China. So keep supporting him, and hopefully he can bring those jobs here to the United States or whatever country that you're in that you want to build your manufacturing base. As enthusiastic as we were about this product, you may be tempted to think that we were compensated for this review. We were not. They did provide us a mega strap. Our friends there provided us the strap, along with the agreement that we would review it, and we'd say what we want to say, and we have. So, and there is no compensation when you purchase these, but there is a special deal for you. If you go to omegastrap.com and purchase one of their products, and then when you check out, enter the promo code, DIRTFARMERJ, J-A-Y, all one word, uppercase, you'll get 10% off through the end of 2021. We think it's a great deal for a product that we think is already fairly priced for the great features in the utility that you're going to get with this. If you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, subscribe to our channel, ring the bell when you do, so you get a notification of content that comes out approximately every week in the shop, the kitchen, in the garage, and in Maggie's kitchen, and a new feature that we've got out called the Maker Next Door. And while you're at it, check out our new merch, go on over to www.DIRTFARMERJ.com. And until the next time, this is DIRTFARMERJ going out to secure a load.