I'm making the change to synthetic winch line, which size do I need to run with????

From what I understand the steel cable I have was rated at 10,000 lbs and a 5/16 synthetic line is rated at 12,500.....the 3/8 has a higher rating but a much higher pice also....

So can I get away with running the 5/16 line and not run into issues...

 

Call Dave at Northridge. He will answer your question and sell you what you need..

 

A little more info would help. What brand of winch do you have and what is the rated max pull? If the cable was rated at 10Klbs then it was 5/16" thick right? I also just switched to synthetic line about a week ago. I have an M8000 and it had a 5/16" cable on it. I decided to go with 3/8" for the added strength. I had to go with 85' instead of the 100' to make sure I wouldn't have any problems with fitment.

 

I swapped my M8000 over to synthetic about two years ago and based on reputation I went with Viking. The customer service at Viking is second to none. Every time I have called them I get to speak to Thor, he answers the phone himself and will spend however long on the phone is needed to answer your questions. He recommended 3/8" as well and also that I go with 85' to keep the wraps down and the torque up. I purchased a spare extension to make up the difference for those really long pulls. I will say that I bought the line for the "cool" factor; there was nothing wrong with my steel cable and fairlead but I wanted something different. It looks really killer and I always get questions about it. However, it does have it's limitations as I found out during a recovery last spring. It will break very, very easily if subjected to a sharp corner and the entire conversation that evening was that a steel cable wouldn't have reacted the same way.

 

And that's why I run steel.

I had at length conversations with management at Warn about this while researching an article I wrote. The 20 year veterans at Warn described different scenarios and the pros & cons of each.

Based on the terrain I wheel in the northeast, steel was my choice. Snapping a synthetic line because it came into contact with an object during a pull, with you & your jeep hanging by a thread, seemed to be a real possibility, albeit a worse case scenario.