I like the price, but I don't think it would be big enough for anything but a ATV. Wanted to share




Earth Anchor, Truck & Suv, Northstar Trailers at Sportsman's Guide

Depends entirely on size and angle.
If the blades are wide enough,
And if you put the point in at about a 25° angle facing TOWARDS the vehicle,
The harder you pull, the deeper the the anchor will dig in to get you out...

If the blades are large enough and strong enough not to let the anchor flop over (Surface area) or to bend (Thickness) this could be a REAL device for getting my dumb butt out of trouble!

According to the Blurb printed with it,
It's 22.5" wide (handles) and 33" high, so that would make the 'Spade' 5 or 6 inches wide as near as I can tell...
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I have one of the current production 'Land Anchors' and I don't think much of it because it's CONSTANTLY getting hung up on tree roots,
Embedding in the clay soil so hard you have to use the winch or vehicle to pull it out afterwards, and it's LARGE, CLUNKY, and a pain to store...

I've had to dig it up, and chop the roots away from it with an axe TWICE so far, that that just BLOWS!

It might be enough in nice firm ground but then you generally don't need a winch there. I would also think that driving it with that slide hammer would kill your back.

I did some looking at land anchors a couple months back and found some neat stuff, especially from companies in Australia and New Zealand. Some interesting ideas but for the cost I would think they could be made at home cheaper for most of them. Sadly I did not save any links but here are some downloaded pictures.

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I really like the design of the first picture simple and easy to make and it should work well. The Second picture is a unit offered by Lan-cor it screws in and they have some demo vides on their site looks like it works well if you have a deep soil to screw into. The 3rd is from Pull-Pal it looks easy enough to make but I would make the spade bigger. The forth is very similar to idea a friend uses to pull out his M38. Basically a base on the ground with pins driven through it. He uses stamped metal catwalk grating which double as mud/sand ramps. He uses 3' lengths of 1" rebar as the pins driving about 2' into the ground he then ties rope around the top of the pins and ties the other end to the grate about a foot back of the pins this prevents the pins from tilting. I have not seen it in use but he showed me some pictures of it pulling out the M38 sunk up to the bumper using a PTO winch, and said it worked good.

Hey Wilhelm!

I don't think that slide hammer would be for driving as much for pulling the spade afterwards...

I would think for driving, you would use that nice, flat hammer driving surface on top the post!
I would think that a sledge hammer or back of an axe would do a VERY good job driving!

Besides, if it's like the plow you posted in the lower Left, like the one I have, all you have to do is set the point,
And pulling on it will do the rest!

They REALLY go deep in this soft clay around here,
And need an act of congress & cases of dynamite to get them out of that same clay...
And you are in for a digging good time if you use it around trees!

My plow has set so deep in this clay we have around here not even the jeep or winch could pull it out,
We have had to dig it out with a shovel before....

And that's mainly why I still carry a 'Tree Saver' strap even though pulling on trees is frowned upon around here...

If I built that thing in the pictures, I don't think it would have that slide hammer, but a moving ring to attach to on that sliding collar...

Aww, that makes more sense. Seemed like a stupid way to drive it but I can see the value for getting it out.

Could you give some more feed back on the lower left "pull Pal" type. I have seen them advertised before but never seen one in action. I defiantly can see it working well in clay. How does in work in other types of soil: mud, rocky soil extra?

Around here the soil varies from mud type silt in the river bottoms, to deep organic mud with scrub plants, to loose weathered shall. I would really like an anchor of some kind but I am not sure one type will suit on all these soils.

Also if you do not mind what make is your anchor and was it well made? I have bought so much well designed but poorly made stuff in the last 5 years that I have been more and more inclined just to make my own, since I wind up rebuilding it anyway. However, I hate to rip off someones design if it will work well out of the box.

Sorry to hit you with all these questions, but you are the first person I have run into who has used that type of anchor.

Worthless in rocky stuff, won't even penetrate shale 'Spoil Banks' where the coal mines have been...

Hateful to drive and remove in hard clay.

Works best in sand and loam. Should be great for Tundra.
In soft stuff, it just keeps digging until the anchor overcomes the pulling force moving it forward.

Problem is, if that 'Soft Stuff' is water saturated clay,
It's virtually impossible to get out! You have to dig it out!

Worked GREAT when we are in the sand river bottoms, but not worth a crap (hard IN, hard OUT) in clay!


Labels have been gone a long time,
I think it was 'Pull Pal' or Pull Plow or something like that.
It's fairly well made, but I've bent it up trying to remove it after use...
NOT built to be pulled backward on!

Should have had a ring/cable on the back side for removal!

I hear you!
Fair to good design, but PISS POOR EXECUTION!
Everything is made in 'China' now, and they just don't have a clue about heat treating metal!

No problem! You have always been a good contributor, and very level headed!
No problem at all about discussing or relaying experiences with a jeeper about jeep stuff!

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...