smokinjay said:When a chain snaps it is a projectile! Why you think it snap tensil or pull what makes it snap. (dont have to be stupid to break a chain or rope).......If you have 5/8 bull line that should be in the 18,000 tensile strength why would you use anything Else. Never see a tree company of any kind with a bag of chain. Oh and darn sure be pretty silly carrying 150 foot of chain...Just saying!
When a rope stretches, most of that stretch is temporary. Rope will snap back to roughly its original length. Chain links are not nearly as elastic as rope fibers. When a chain stretches, most of that energy goes into permanetly deforming the metal links. Therefore there is a lot less energy stored in that chain at its breaking point.
I've never seen 3/8 chain break, but whenever I've seen lighter duty chain snap its never gone more than a few feet. When two fairly inelastic objects (say a tractor hitch and a big rock) are joined by a fairly inelastic chain I've just heard a "ping", the chain drops, and the two things are no longer connected. On the other hand I've seen rope really fly when it breaks.
I have Yale XTC which is 10k break, 2k WLL. 3/8 G70 chain is 26k break, 6.6k WLL. I use the rope for pulling a tree over, because I actually want a little stretch there and there's no way I want to pull 3/8 chain way the hell up in a tree. I use chain for SLOWLY pulling out stumps, rocks, etc with a 4000lb pickup. I'm pretty confident the tires will slip first, then the U-joints will destroy themselves, THEN I'll worry about the chain breaking.
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(I'm convinced that rope is slightly more dangerous than chain. But the one that actually scares me is wire rope. The mass of chain + the elasticity of rope.)