Recovery point

Also called rated recovery point, recovery hook, rated shackle mount

A recovery point is a rated, frame-mounted attachment designed to take the shock load of a vehicle being pulled out, which is a different thing from a tie-down loop, and using the wrong one is the most common way recovery gear hurts somebody.

What is a recovery point?

A hook, ring or bracket bolted to the vehicle's frame with fasteners of a specified grade, engineered to take a rated load in the directions a recovery pulls. The rating is the whole substance of the thing. An unrated hook is a decoration.

The confusion is with the loops and hooks that came on the vehicle. Many of those are tie-down or lashing points, installed to hold the vehicle onto a transporter, and they are rated for a fraction of what a kinetic recovery puts through them. Some are shipping eyes with no rating at all. They look identical to the thing you want and they are not it.

The gap in the standards

There is no federal standard, and this one we checked ourselves. We pulled the complete current text of 49 CFR Part 571, the whole body of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, and searched all 2.9 million characters of it. Recovery point, recovery attachment, tow hook, towing device and recovery hook return nothing at all. The single hit for tiedown is a lab instruction about bolting a car to the floor for a door crush test.

SAE has one document, and reading its status is the whole lesson. J2069, Recovery Attachment Points for Passenger Cars, Vans, and Light Trucks, was issued in 1993, last revised in 2001, and stabilized in 2019, which is SAE's word for a standard it no longer maintains. Its own scope says it is intended to provide guidelines to the vehicle manufacturer for applying recovery attachment points on vehicles rated up to 3178 kilograms. Guidelines, to the manufacturer, on a document nobody is updating. Nothing obliges an aftermarket recovery point to meet it, and it is not a rating scheme.

Australia comes closest, and it lands in a strange place. Its Consumer Goods (Motor Vehicle Recovery Straps) Safety Standard 2017 makes it law that every snatch strap sold carries a warning telling you to only attach recovery straps to an approved recovery point or device that is suitably rated for use with the strap. That is a legal requirement to print the words approved and suitably rated on a label.

What we cannot tell you is what makes a recovery point approved under Australian law. The rule is widely attributed to Vehicle Standards Bulletin 14, the national code of practice for light vehicle construction and modification, and we could not confirm that: the department's site was unreachable from here and we have not read the document. Treat the attribution as unverified rather than as either confirmed or debunked.

A country requires the label to say approved and suitably rated. We could not find out what either word means.

The contrast with ordinary industrial rigging is stark. A steel shackle used on a construction site falls under a federal rule saying it must carry a permanently affixed and legible marking of its rated capacity, and that an employer may not load it beyond that. The bracket you bolt to your frame to absorb a far more violent load carries no such requirement anywhere in American law.

The practical consequence in the United States is that a recovery point's rating is a manufacturer's claim, tested to a method the manufacturer chose. Buy from makers who publish both the method and the numbers, and be sceptical of anything sold on appearance. If someone can point us at a standard we missed, we would rather be corrected than right.

A rated recovery point costs less than a hospital visit and takes twenty minutes to fit. It is the cheapest safety item on any build.

What never to pull from

A tow ball, which can shear off and travel through a windscreen and has done. A hitch pin loaded sideways. A steering or suspension component. A hole someone drilled in a bumper. A hook that was on the vehicle but has no rating stamped on it or published for it. And any point that puts the load into sheet metal rather than into the frame.