Dragan Systems Pocket Winch Review

The band Dawes reminds us that “Things happen. That’s all they ever do.” In fact, just last week I planned to take a quick 3-mile hike down to the river. Instead, I ended up in a humid session of parkour, traversing around and over a series of downed trees and limbs on the trail.

Where I was on foot and could easily figure out a way around, over, or under these obstacles, the trail I was on was a shared-use trail. Anyone on a dirt bike, quad, or side-by-side would have had their adventure abruptly ended.

This is an all-too-common occurrence in New England, where second-growth forests leave massive trees waiting for a windstorm to snap off their branches or topple them over altogether. It keeps people like me busy in the spring and summer, folks who want to make sure the trails are clear for other folks. Especially now, when state and government trail crews are few and far between. However, no matter how broad my shoulders may be, wood is heavy and cumbersome.

Enter the Dragan Systems Pocket Winch ($399), a lightweight, compact come-along-style winch capable of pulling 1 ton and weighing 1.5 pounds. But it’s not just for being a good person and clearing a trail. The Pocket Winch is great for people who get stuck in the mud, build tree forts, and even remove the occasional stump. Its lightweight, compact design fits in a pouch smaller than a Nalgene bottle, so it takes up minimal space wherever you store it.

In short: The Dragan Systems Pocket Winch is the kind of tool that you didn’t think you needed until you get into a jam that you can’t get out of. It’s an easy-to-use, over-engineered, light, compact, reliable come-along device. Throw one in your pack or glove box and be the self-reliant goober you claim you are. Compared with traditional come-alongs, it’s extremely light and beautifully engineered, but it comes at a hefty price and has a limited working load of 2,000 pounds.

Dragan Systems Pocket Winch Review

Who Is Dragan Systems?

Behind the brand are two aerospace engineers, Jake Ruhl and Ryan Neil, who saw a need for self-rescue. When you’re out there on your own, or even in a group, riding through rough terrain, things happen that can leave you stranded.

And that’s when they conceived the idea for the Pocket Winch — after a night out on a ride gone wrong. So, these two guys set out to create a product that did not exist.

Sure, there are plenty of come-alongs you can pick up from any random auto parts store. They’re generally not easy to use, susceptible to jamming, and — speaking from experience — break when you need them the most.

They envisioned the antithesis of the common come-along: something lightweight, compact, easy to use, and fully serviceable in the off-chance it failed. The goal was to self-rescue without being burdened by a more cumbersome device.

What Is It?

The Pocket Winch is a pint-sized object mover with great potential. Made with quality, not quantity in mind, it’s a revolutionary take on a come-along.

What’s a come-along? A come-along is a human-powered rescue device that you attach to a stationary object and the object you’re trying to rescue. In the middle of the mechanism is a hand crank that you use your own brute force to move whatever you’re trying to recover.

By nature, they are clunky and cumbersome and will fail when you need them the most.

While the Pocket Winch borrows the concept from these relics, it is engineered to a much higher standard. Visually similar to a come-along, but a fraction of the size, each piece of the Pocket Winch is very specific. This includes a carbon fiber handle that provides tactile feedback so you know when you’ve reached its limit, as well as a proprietary poly line that uses Dyneema fibers to prevent fraying and premature wear.

There is also the Dragan Capio, which acts as the winch’s belay device, and the Dragan Doubler force multiplier, which lets you double the amount of weight you’re pulling. These two pieces are so finely engineered that I found myself staring at them on the trail. They’re almost too specific and way too easy to use.

Additionally, the entire kit weighs only 1.5 pounds, and all parts are replaceable.

In the Field

You can move a lot of things around with a tool designed to exert 1 ton of force. I had visions of trail maintenance dancing through my head the moment I saw the Pocket Winch. The number of trees that come down around here in the winter far outnumbers the number of people available to move them off the trails. However, the one task that really proved the worth of this mighty might was building a bridge.

A dear friend of mine has been converting the woods in his yard into the ultimate campsite/four-wheel adventure park. Bisecting the 10 acres he’s modifying is a creek that, in some places, has 10-foot–high banks that make it nearly impossible to get up and over in an ATV, side-by-side, or jacked-up 4Runner. Not one to hire someone to build something, he envisioned a bridge whose main structure was boulders and telephone poles.

The average New England telephone pole weighs between 600 and 1,000 pounds. They’re easy to push around with the right excavator, but to get them positioned just right requires finesse. Aside from firing rifles and burning octane on various off-road vehicles, we spent an afternoon using the Pocket Winch to dial in the final resting places of four fresh utility poles.

Part One: The Setup

It takes a few minutes to wrap your head around how the Pocket Winch works. The key thing to remember is that you will be working the closest to the anchor side and will need enough line to secure the Capio to your load end.

Like any belay device, the Capio has its quirks baked in to help it work at its full potential. It’s not a time-consuming endeavor, but I do recommend you lay everything out on the tailgate of your favorite side-by-side and read the included quick-start guide. (You can also commit this video to memory before heading out on your adventure.)

The Capio also has the direction the rope needs to feed through laser-engraved on the side of its anodized aluminum body. These little bits of detail are nice cues when you’re in the middle of it all. Key reminder: it will always be attached to a sling on the load side.

Dragan gives you 25 feet of high-strength line, a 1-foot and 4-foot sling with the Complete Kit. I would recommend you pick up another 100 feet of line, as well as a couple more slings. The Pocket Winch is a precision system that you don’t want to tarnish with ropes and straps you have lying around. And, trust me, you can always use more line and more slings.

Part Two: Getting Down to Brass Tacks

Once we had everything secured, the act of cranking the actual winch seemed a little too easy.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods using traditional come-alongs to move everything from logs to the tail end of stuck cars that shouldn’t have been out there in the first place. There’s always a struggle.

However, with the Pocket Winch, struggle is replaced with response. When you reach the maximum capacity of the winch, the carbon fiber handle will start to bend.

We reached that point when setting the position for the final pole. One of the bolts in the pole snagged on one of the footing boulders. I backed off some of the line to release the tension, repositioned the tractor we were anchoring to, and gave it a second shot. Easy peasy.

Part Three: The End Result

I purposely left the Dragan Doubler out of the initial setup to get an idea of what it felt like to max out the capacity of the Pocket Winch — and never got there. Aside from the bolt snagging on the last pole and having to reposition our angle, everything worked smoothly.

The high modulus UHMWPE fiber line is incredibly strong.

In the end, we spent around 3 hours getting four telephone poles finely oriented so that they were spaced evenly and the top decking could be fastened into place. And even after beating the heck out of the Pocket Winch on that hot, muggy day in the middle of the woods, it still looks fresh and clean. This is a clear indication that this mechanism was built to last.

On our last go at using the Pocket Winch, we set it up on the load side instead of the anchor side. Everything still worked, but not as easily as it did when we had it set up on the anchor side. I wasn’t worried about the winch failing; I just knew that we were working harder than we needed to.

In Closing

The resounding issue with being self-reliant and being able to self-rescue is the bulkiness of the gear you need to do it. When it comes down to moving off-road power equipment and the like, the rescue devices are big, bulky, and a pain in the ass to use.

Dragan Systems changed that with its Pocket Winch. The compact size and lightweight construction are just the tip of the iceberg here. The quality of the materials and their modularity, as well as the overall ease of use of the product, really make this thing a no-brainer to throw in your pack or a storage bin.

Mine is currently in my day bag for those river hikes where the trails aren’t just littered with branches, but also massive chunks of trunk and other elements of “tree” that aren’t easy to buck and move.

The Pocket Winch is one of those things you don’t realize you need until you run into a situation where you actually need it. In writing this article, I hope to help some of you out there prepare for the unknown. We all eventually get into a jam where we need something like this — so it’s better to have it than to waste a day wishing you did.