Keep the cable on your winch drum neat and tight through a weekly maintenance procedure known as power wrapping. This exercise will prolong the life of your winch line by preventing weak points caused by unnecessary kinks and flat spots.

“You should power wrap your winch at least once a week,” recommends Rene Jimenez, a technical advisor at Zip’s AW Direct. “You want to keep your wire rope tight on the spool so it doesn’t dive or kink and start what I call the paper clip effect, where the more it bends, the weaker it gets before eventually failing.”

Power wrapping works in tandem with the cable tensioner. As illustrated in this video from Miller Industries, the procedure is performed by free-spooling the winch line out and then winding it back up under a load by attaching the hook to another vehicle or deadman.

“As you pull the wire rope out, you want to keep at least seven wraps on that last layer so you don’t pull all of the wire rope out of the drum. That would create quite a mess,” explains Miller’s Billy Drane in the video.

Experts say power wrapping should be done regardless of the size of the winch: from car carriers to heavy-duty recovery vehicles. The procedure is effective for both wire and synthetic rope. In fact, according to Jimenez, power wrapping helps “set the braid” on a new synthetic line.

Power wrapping is “something that is very important to do,” Drane said. “What can tend to happen (when you don’t) is the loose wire rope going around the drum will cause the top layers to bury down (or dive) into the inner layers.”

“Once you get in the habit of doing this regularly, it really doesn’t take very long to do,” Jimenez said. “Take a few minutes each week to prevent a headache down the road.”