If you get a shackle with a pin to fit a 1⅛" hole, that sucker is going to be 50# and tugboat ready!
The larger AEV holes are sized and radiused so it’s easier to insert the larger soft shackles required to match the truck’s weight. Soft shackles are easy to work with, weigh little, and take up little space behind the seat.
I don’t think there’s much benefit to leaving hard shackles attached to the truck unless you’re doing recovery work full time. They're an attractive theft item, they suggest there’s more recovery gear in the vehicle, and they’ll work against the paint and eventually wear through it over time. (Unless you’re meticulous about removing the hard shackles to wash them and the associated rubber parts, dirt and dust will accumulate, adhere, embed, and act like sand paper.) The shackles will also get crusty and corrode if left exposed to the elements, particularly in states that treat/salt the roads in the winter, so they eventually become more difficult to remove. Really, unless the principal benefit is decoration, hard shackles are most useful when they’re available in a bag of recovery tools/equipment. With soft shackles on board you may never use them.
I still carry hard shackles because winch cable can be run through them in some scenarios (assuming they can still be removed and reattached), and some folks I might need to help won’t have radiused attachment points that are friendly to soft shackles. In that case I may be able to attach a hard shackle to the rig I want to assist. Because of this I also carry a trailer hitch attachment, as many vehicles have a 2” receiver that easily converts to an attachment point.
Last note. I still help people whenever I can, but remember the phrase “No good deed goes unpunished.” In the
new America people are disinclined to accept responsibility for their own messes, so you might well be sued for extricating the idiot from the snowbank when he later claims the damage to his vehicle was caused by your recovery, not his initial crash. This never would have happened in 1950 or 1970, but starving lawyers are as thick as fleas these days, and our culture has changed…
