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TeamRush, thanks for the information and kind words.
I will take a closer look at the Pull-Pal type anchor. Do you think a 5' long chunk of light chain attached to the trailing edge of the spade would help pull it out? What I was thinking was the chain would fallow the spade and then pull it back out the way it went in, provided of coarse the jeep could be repositioned behind the anchor.
I HOPE I never have to bury one 5' to get it to hold!
I have been in that loose river bed sand/sediment and had to sink the anchor 3' before it would hold!
Couldn't see ANY of the plow arm or cable we used to pull it back out before it got the Jeep moving again...
When I worked in the military moving heavy equipment,
I used to use a 'Dead Man'...
Large chunk of bar stock with 1/4" plate steel welded to it, no 'V' forming,
And the plate was about 3 feel long and stuck out about 1 foot on each side of the bar.
You would drive that thing into the ground at about a 35 or 40 degree angle towards the load, and once you got all 3 feet of the blade in the ground,
It would work great as an anchor even in sand,
but it was about 5+ feet long and weighted about 75 pounds, so it was no light weight!
Anchor cable was mounted right at the top of the blades,
So when you pulled on the anchor cable, it would cut it's way through the ground to face directly towards the load,
And that worked as a 'Lynch Pin' right at the top of the blades,
Instead of pulling on the top of the bar stock where you had mechanical advantage over the blades.
They had a large clevis ring mounted right under the 'Head', (Large flat place for use to hammer) for pulling it back out with a truck after we were done.
Sharpening both ends of the blades made it MUCH easier to hammer in and pull out,
But now that I think about it, having longer blades that were bent in a shallow 'V' would have given us more pulling power...
Sometimes we would have to drive a dozen of these 'Dead Man' anchors to get something like an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) out,
And I heard tales of the tankers and self propelled artillery using 20 or more to get tanks or artillery out...
I know the unit we were attached to carried about 50 of these anchors, and unlike a lot of the crap we were issued,
These ALWAYS went to the field with us!
The motor pool recovery guys wouldn't go ANYWHERE without them, and most of the heavy truck guys that had winches had two or three on their trucks and were QUITE protective of them,
So I guess they make lives much more simple for them.
I think I'm going to try to make up a light duty version of that thing you posted and see if it works...
I should be over to the shop that has the press break next week, and I'll probably make the shaft out of heavy rebar since it's cheap and I'm not throwing a billion tons of vehicle at it...
Remind me and I'll post some pictures when I'm done...