The Ultimate Recovery Kit from Saber Offroad promises to be lighter and safer. We headed to Birdsville to take a closer look.
Recovery kits aren’t new. Just about every single off-road accessories maker has a handful in its armoury. But, as anyone who’s purchased a complete recovery kit will know, they’re heavy flamin’ things.
Not this one. Weighing from just 10kg (the 8K kit), the Saber Offroad Ultimate Recovery Kit claims to be, not just lighter, but also safer because it’s based on soft-shackles and kinetic ropes (no metal parts other than the recovery points). And that means you can store it in a greater range of places than a traditional kit, like up on the roof of your fourby.
There are two kits available in the Ultimate Recovery Kit range and these are the 8K and 12K. The former is aimed at mid-weight vehicles like the Toyota HiLux, Ford Ranger and Isuzu D-Max etc, while the beefy 12K kit is designed to handle bigger vehicles like Land Rover Defender, LandCruiser 200, 79 Series, Nissan Patrol, etc and/or those 4x4s towing camper trailers, caravans, or boats.
Right now you can buy the 8K kit for $947.90 (down from $1203.50) and the 12K kit for $998.70 (down from $1263.50). But what do you actually get for your coin? A lot actually – check it out:
The 8K Ultimate Recovery Kit Includes:
- 1 x 9M, 8200KG Kinetic Rope & Bag
- 2 x 10,000KG HDX SaberPro Soft Shackles
- 1 x 20M, 9500KG Black SaberPro Winch Extension Rope with Bound Eyes
- 1 x Ezy-Glide 12,000kg WLL Blue Recovery Ring & Bag
- 1 x 3M, 15,000kg Spectra Extreme Utility Rope
- 1 x 14,700kg SaberPro Soft Shackle with Sheath
- 1 x 600mm, 9000kg SaberPro Soft Anchor Point (SAP)
- 1 x 1200mm, 12,000kg SaberPro Soft Anchor Point (SAP)
- 1 x Winch Damper
- 1 x Recovery Gloves
- 1 x Recovery Gear Bag
The 12K Ultimate Recovery Kit Includes:
- 1 x 9M, 12,500KG Kinetic Recovery Rope & Bag
- 2 x 17,000KG SaberPro Bound Soft Shackles
- 1 x 20M, 9500KG Black SaberPro Winch Extension Rope with Bound Eyes
- 1 x 3M, 15,000kg Spectra Extreme Utility Rope
- 1 x Ezy-Glide 12,000kg WLL Blue Recovery Ring & Bag
- 1 x 14,700kg SaberPro Soft Shackle with Sheath
- 1 x 600mm, 9000kg SaberPro Soft Anchor Point (SAP)
- 1 x 1200mm, 12,000kg SaberPro Soft Anchor Point (SAP)
- 1 x Winch Damper
- 1 x Recovery Gloves
- 1 x Recovery Gear Bag
Some of the guys at MotoFomo were lucky enough to get out to Birdsville recently and they brought along both the 8K and 12K Ultimate Recovery Kits for testing. And the first thing worth mentioning, they said, is the quality of the Australian-made bag that all the recovery gear comes in. It’s a tough bag with UV-stabilised material and it stood up to the dust, sun and heat of the desert beautifully. We’ve used recovery kits before where a weekend out in the sun is enough to fade them.
And it’s while you’re yanking the bag out of the boot, or off the roof that the weight, or lack of it, hits you, our chief product tester and the model for those photos in this post, Samuel Clarke, said. The 8K kit weighs just 10kg and the 12K kit is 11kg – I had one recovery kit that weighed close to 20kg and didn’t have as much stuff in it as the Saber Offroad kits.
We’ve all heard horror stories about recoveries using steel shackles going wrong and that’s why we’re big fans of soft shackles and removing as much metal as possible from the recovery process. For a snatch recovery using the Saber Offroad kits, there are no metal parts besides the recovery points, and that makes for a safer and gentler recovery – kinetic rope boasts up to 50% more stretch than an older style snatch strap.
And according to our gear tester, Sam, “Saber’s recovery ring performs exceptionally well in double-line winch pulls” and that’s because Saber told us it’s got an internal channel diameter “designed for the optimal bend radius of synthetic winch ropes”. Read any reports on synthetic rope and you’ll understand that they don’t like being kinked, so ensuring you’ve got the correct bend profile means you’re getting maximum potential from them.
And Sam said the inclusion of the 15K Spectra Extreme Utility Rope in both kits is great because it can be used for a bunch of things, like as an equaliser strap across two recovery points, tree trunk protector when winching and can even be used to extend the winch line or as a non-standard recovery point (around an axle for example).
We’ll have a full review of the Saber Offroad Ultimate Recovery Kit online soon and are working on a full video explainer showing how to use ‘soft’ recovery items, so, keep an eye out for that. Anything else you want to know about ‘soft’ recovery gear?