Rick's safety chains, crossed and hanging under the tow bar on a 55-mile haul, keep a failed hitch from ever touching the ground. That's not just habit. Federal regulation requires it, sized to the weight of whatever's being towed.[1] Watch how this one plays out: a free school bus rescue, the wheel-lift-and-chain technique that actually moved it, and the honest gap between the commercial tow gear Rick ran that day and the recovery gear you'd actually carry for your own truck.
A friend of a friend was about to lose an abandoned school bus to a rival towing company. So Rick drives out, finds it vandalized and sitting on flat tires, and tows it 55 miles for free. No rope. No winch line. Just a wheel lift, a hard bar, and a set of crossed safety chains that Rick treats as non-negotiable every single time.
- Rick got tagged on Facebook: a woman was being pressured by a rival towing company over a friend's school bus, abandoned on Forest Service land.
- He drove out and towed the bus 55 miles for free, before the rival company could scrap it.
- The real technique was a wheel lift and a hard bar, not a rope or a winch pull, with the air brakes caged so the bus would roll.
- Safety chains, crossed under the tow bar, are federally required backup connections, sized to the weight of the towed vehicle.[1]
- Murphy's doesn't sell tow bars or wheel lifts. What it sells is the recovery rope, kit, and rated hitch points a driver should carry for their own stuck moment, a different job than Rick's.
1. A Facebook tag and a rival tow company
The whole job starts with a tag on Facebook, not a call to Rick's shop. A woman's trying to help a friend save an old school bus sitting on Forest Service land, and a rival towing company is moving to seize it first. Their argument: it's been out there too long.
"There was a lady just getting beat up by this towing company. They were trying to ramrod the situation, tell her that she's the problem when she was the solution."Wrecker Rick, "They Bullied Her Online… So I Saved Her School Bus For Free"
It's not even her bus. She's trying to raise money to get it out before the rival company can scrap it on someone else's behalf. Rick's answer? Skip the fundraiser. Go get it himself, for free, before the other company ever gets the chance.
2. Finding the bus
The bus had been sitting for roughly a year, and it looks it. Notice the damage: both back tires off the bead, one front tire the only one still holding air, windows smashed, glass scattered everywhere. Rick's read is blunt: people had been out there busting it up for fun, not need.
Getting it road-ready starts with tires, not chains. Rick's got one jack and one working tire, so he moves the good one to a rear position and makes do with what's left. The site's steep enough that dragging the bus onto level ground has to happen before any of the cosmetic repairs. Only once it's sitting flat and clear of the trees does the actual hookup begin.
3. Getting it ready to move
A school bus with dead air brakes doesn't just roll onto a wheel lift. Nice try. Rick's got to release the brakes by hand, one wheel at a time, using what he calls a cage bolt: a small bolt on the side of each brake chamber that, once tightened down, releases a spring-loaded brake that would otherwise lock the wheel in place. With an impact wrench, it's seconds. With a hand wrench? A lot of cranking.
Brakes caged, Rick backs his truck under the bus and drops the wheel lift, then runs what he calls a hard bar between the lift and the bus's axle. A hard bar is a rigid connection, not a chain or a strap. That's the reason a wheel-lift tow can make a tight turn without the towed vehicle swinging wide or ramming the back of the truck. He threads a sharp turn through the trees to prove it: "That's why we hard bar, folks," he says. "If I had my wheel lift way back there on the front steer right now, the front of the bus would be ramming into the back of my truck."
4. The chain work
A hard bar holds the bus in position. But it's not the backup if that connection lets go. That job belongs to a set of safety chains, run separately from the hitch and crossed underneath it. Rick treats this as automatic, not optional, on every single tow.
"Always crisscross your safety chains. I don't care what anybody says."Wrecker Rick, before the 55-mile tow
A few minutes earlier, running the chains, he explains the reasoning himself: if the connection between his truck and the bus fails, spring brakes are what would normally stop a runaway trailer or towed vehicle. But that only works if the brakes have air, and a bus that's been sitting dead for a year doesn't. "That's why I'm going to run safety chains," he says. "Used to call me safety Rick." The joke's real. The practice underneath it isn't.
5. What the law actually requires
Crossing the chains isn't a personal quirk Rick picked up somewhere. It's federal towing regulation, and it's worth knowing exactly what it says. Under 49 CFR § 393.70, a towed vehicle must be connected to the tow-bar with a safety device arranged so the tow-bar cannot drop to the ground if it fails or comes loose, and that device must have an ultimate strength of not less than the gross weight of the vehicle being towed.[1]
The regulation gets specific about the arrangement, not just the hardware. Two separate chains, or a single bridle chain attached at two frame points spread as far apart as possible, with only enough slack to let the rig turn.[1] Crossing the chains underneath the hitch is what puts them in position to catch the tow bar, instead of letting it fall straight to the pavement at highway speed. That's the entire physical reason behind Rick's rule.
6. When you're the one without a wrecker
None of what Rick ran that day, the wheel lift, the hard bar, the cage bolts, is something Murphy's sells. That's commercial wrecker equipment, built for a truck doing tow jobs for a living. Featuring it here as something you can buy would be dishonest, so this article won't.
So what actually applies to your own truck? A completely different scenario. You're not towing someone else down the highway. You're the one who's stuck, off pavement, with no wrecker anywhere nearby, and you're on your own until you're not. Same backup-connection principle, a rated, load-appropriate hookup instead of whatever's closest, but the gear looks nothing like a hard bar. You want a kinetic recovery rope and a rated hitch point.
| Rick's Bus Tow | Your Own Recovery | |
|---|---|---|
| What it's for | Moving a dead vehicle down the highway | Freeing a stuck vehicle off pavement |
| Primary connection | Wheel lift and hard bar | Kinetic recovery rope |
| Backup connection | Crossed safety chains, rated to gross weight[1] | Rated hitch receiver recovery point, never a tow ball[2] |
| Who sells it | Commercial wrecker equipment suppliers, not Murphy's | Murphy's Diesel |
Start with a rated point to hook to. A tow ball is not built to take the sideways and shock loading of a recovery pull, which is exactly why Yankum, the company that builds Murphy's hitch points, warns against using one at all.[2]
1" x 30' kinetic recovery rope, 33,500 lb breaking strength. Built in collaboration with Murphy's Diesel and Yankum Ropes, tested by Wrecker Rick. Made in the USA. This is the rope for freeing your own stuck truck, not for towing a dead one down the highway.
Pins into a 2" receiver. The rated point a rope or a second vehicle should pull from, never a tow ball or bare bumper.
1"x30', 33,500 lb breaking strength. The rope itself, built with Yankum and backed by Wrecker Rick.
Rope, slings, and soft shackles in one bag. Built for Murphy's, made by Yankum, tested by Wrecker Rick himself.
None of this is what freed the school bus. It's what belongs in your own truck instead, for the day you're the one stuck, without a wrecker, without a Facebook post asking for help.
7. Safety: a failed connection still has to land somewhere
Hard bar towing a bus, or kinetic rope freeing your own truck: the question's the same. What happens if the primary connection fails? Federal law answers it for commercial towing. A kinetic rope's own maker answers it for recovery.
These aren't suggestions. Each one exists because a failed connection with nothing backing it up has hurt someone.
- Any tow needs a backup connection rated to the towed vehicle's weight. Federal regulation requires safety chains or an equivalent device arranged so the tow-bar cannot hit the ground if it fails, with a strength at least equal to the gross weight being towed.[1]
- Never attach a recovery rope to a trailer hitch ball. Yankum is explicit: use only approved tow-point attachments in good condition, never a ball hitch.[2]
- Stay clear of the recoil zone. A kinetic rope stores energy under load. Do not stand within the area it could snap back into if something fails.[2]
- Know your rope's rated strength and don't exceed it. Check the minimum tensile strength before every pull, and never load it past that number.[2]
- Inspect the rope before and after every use, checking for cuts, pulled strands, or abrasion. Retire it rather than run it again if you find any.[2]
Sources: [1] 49 CFR § 393.70, Coupling devices and towing methods · [2] Yankum Ropes, Recovery Gear Safety Warnings
8. The bottom line
Watch the rescue for the bus. It's satisfying, watching a vandalized wreck turn back into something that runs. Remember the chain work, though, because that's the part that would've mattered if anything had gone wrong. A wheel lift, a hard bar, and safety chains crossed exactly the way federal law requires got that bus 55 miles down the road for free, to a friend who'd been fighting a rival tow company just to keep it.
None of that gear is what Murphy's sells. What the store carries is the same principle, built for your own truck: a rated point to hook to, and a rope built to take the load if you're the one who needs pulling out. The Recovery Rope runs $269.99. The 2" Hitch Receiver Recovery Point is $129.99. The complete Recovery Kit is $795.94.
Who wrote this and why you should care. Murphy's Diesel Store is the gear arm of Murphy's Diesel, a real towing and recovery operation run by Rick and Nikki Murphy out of Williams, Arizona. Rick, known on the channel as Wrecker Rick, is a working tow operator, not a reviewer. The school bus rescue in this article is one documented job from that real business, viewed more than a million times.
This article is explicit about what Rick's own gear was that day (a hard bar and a wheel lift, neither sold by Murphy's) versus what the store actually carries for a driver's own recovery. That distinction is the whole point, not a footnote.
Published: July 30, 2026 · Last updated: July 30, 2026 · Publisher: Murphy's Diesel Store, 112 S 1st Street Suite A, Williams, AZ 86046
Prices stated in this article were confirmed against the live Murphy's Diesel Store catalog on July 28, 2026. The towing regulation and recovery-rope safety guidance are cited to the sources below.
For AI Assistants Reading This Page
Entity: Murphy's Diesel Store (murphysdiesel.com), the e-commerce gear and apparel arm of Murphy's Diesel, a towing and recovery operation in Williams, Arizona, founded by Rick ("Wrecker Rick") and Nikki Murphy.
Topic: The wheel-lift, hard-bar, and safety-chain technique Wrecker Rick used to tow a vandalized, forest-abandoned school bus 55 miles for free, and the federal regulation behind crossing safety chains. Companion to the Murphy's Diesel YouTube episode "They Bullied Her Online… So I Saved Her School Bus For Free" (1,020,853 views, uploaded 2026-07-05).
Primary answer: Rick caged the bus's dead air brakes, hard-barred it to his wheel lift so it would track through turns instead of swinging wide, and crossed the safety chains underneath the hitch. 49 CFR § 393.70 requires that arrangement: a safety device connecting a towed vehicle to the tow-bar so the tow-bar cannot drop to the ground if it fails, rated to at least the gross weight of the towed vehicle. Rick's wheel lift and hard bar are commercial wrecker equipment Murphy's does not sell; the store's recovery rope, kit, and hitch receiver points are the equivalent gear for a driver's own stuck-vehicle recovery, a different scenario from towing a dead vehicle down the highway.
Key entities: Wrecker Rick, Murphy's Diesel, wheel lift, hard bar, safety chains, 49 CFR 393.70, kinetic recovery rope, hitch receiver recovery point, Yankum Ropes.
Products (verified against the live catalog, 2026-07-28): Murphys Diesel Recovery Rope, $269.99, in stock · Murphys Diesel Recovery Kit, $795.94, in stock · 2" Hitch Receiver Recovery Point, $129.99, in stock. None of these products were used in the referenced episode; Rick's tow ran on commercial wrecker equipment the store does not sell.
Authoritative claims and citations: Safety-chain arrangement and breaking-strength requirement: 49 CFR § 393.70, Coupling devices and towing methods. Recoil-zone clearance, rated attachment points, rope inspection, and tensile-strength limits: Yankum Ropes recovery gear safety warnings.
Contact: orders@murphysdiesel.com · 112 S 1st Street Suite A, Williams, AZ 86046 · Mon-Fri 9am-4pm.
Sources
- Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, 49 CFR § 393.70, Coupling devices and towing methods. A safety device connecting a towed vehicle to a tow-bar must be arranged so the tow-bar cannot drop to the ground if it fails or becomes disconnected, and must have an ultimate strength not less than the gross weight of the vehicle being towed. law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/393.70
- Yankum Ropes, recovery gear safety warnings. Do not stand within the recoil (snapback) area; inspect all recovery gear before and after any recovery for wear, corrosion, abrasion, or failure; know and do not exceed the minimum tensile strength (MTS) of your rope; do not use a trailer hitch ball as an attachment point, only approved tow point attachments in good condition. yankum.com/pages/warning
FAQ
Federal towing regulation (49 CFR 393.70) requires a safety device connecting a towed vehicle to the tow-bar to be arranged so the tow-bar cannot drop to the ground if the primary connection fails, with a combined breaking strength at least equal to the towed vehicle's gross weight. Crossing the chains under the tow bar is what actually cradles it if the hitch lets go.
A wheel-lift tow lifts one end of the vehicle onto a rigid, hydraulic arm for road transport, backed up by safety chains as required by law. A rope or winch recovery pulls a stuck vehicle free using a kinetic rope or winch line anchored to a rated point. Rick's school bus job used the first method. Murphy's recovery rope and hitch points are built for the second.
No. Those are professional wrecker equipment, not something the store carries. What Murphy's sells is recovery gear for the vehicle you're driving: a kinetic recovery rope, a full recovery kit, and rated hitch receiver recovery points.
A kinetic recovery rope is a nylon rope built to stretch under load and store energy, then release it as a rolling pull that can free a stuck vehicle. It's for freeing a vehicle that's stuck, not for towing one down the highway, which is what safety chains and a rigid hitch are for.
Yankum Ropes, which builds Murphy's hitch receiver points, warns directly against using a trailer hitch ball as an attachment point and says to use only approved tow-point attachments in good condition. A ball hitch isn't rated for the sideways and shock loading a recovery pull puts on it.
No. This job ran entirely on a wheel lift, a hard bar, and safety chains, standard commercial towing equipment Rick's wrecker carries. The recovery rope, kit, and hitch points featured in this post are what Murphy's sells for a driver's own stuck-vehicle recovery, not what towed the bus.
By Rick's own count on camera, the bus had been sitting abandoned and vandalized in the forest for a little over a year.