Birdwatcher camping tents (and similar)
This is directed specifically to Mason Smith, but may be of interest to others:
I'm re-doing the tent cover for my Birdwatcher called Irish Pennant. The first try wasn't
so hot.
WB 174 (ref also to WB 163) shows a widely travel camping tent. The tent supports are
parallel to each other so the tent can roll up quickly into a long tidy bundle, so I'll copy
that.
Birdwatcher-style lexan sides have stainless screw-and dome washers fastenings. I
replaced that with a row of little cast nylon fairleads with the screwholes an inch and
three-eights on centre to pad the lexan fastenings. The black fairleads sit over black
caulking and are quite unobtrusive.
The tent poles fit into the fairleads just perfectly for a start -- 0.038 inch plastic 'grip
tips' inserted into 0.38x26inch 'pole sections'. I got mine with advice from Mountain
Equipment Coop but they appear to be perfectly generic and should be available a lot of
places. Sorry, tent pole replacement stuff is not in the on-line catalogue.
Cost was OK, Can$125 for the lot and that includes nylon tube webbing for the poles to
slide into and eighth inch shock cord to hold things together. The fairleads were 25cents
each at wholesale and I used about 100 of them on four inch centres.
The second point here will tell you why I've called my boat Irish Pennant -- I want to be
able to fix anything with my knife and a hank of light line. Even my mast is held in the
partners with a lashing.
I've always found zippers are the weak link in boat canvas, so instead I use dutchman's
overcoat fastening -- interlocked loops and eyes. (Brion Toss, I think, has a drawing
somewhere showing the setup, but its pretty simple.)
The loops and fairleads between each pair of tent poles are a short 'zipper' instead of a
continuous zip. That's so rigging and unrigging can be controllable in a wind.
I think I've got an improvement here. It's looking good for me so far.
Eric
I'm re-doing the tent cover for my Birdwatcher called Irish Pennant. The first try wasn't
so hot.
WB 174 (ref also to WB 163) shows a widely travel camping tent. The tent supports are
parallel to each other so the tent can roll up quickly into a long tidy bundle, so I'll copy
that.
Birdwatcher-style lexan sides have stainless screw-and dome washers fastenings. I
replaced that with a row of little cast nylon fairleads with the screwholes an inch and
three-eights on centre to pad the lexan fastenings. The black fairleads sit over black
caulking and are quite unobtrusive.
The tent poles fit into the fairleads just perfectly for a start -- 0.038 inch plastic 'grip
tips' inserted into 0.38x26inch 'pole sections'. I got mine with advice from Mountain
Equipment Coop but they appear to be perfectly generic and should be available a lot of
places. Sorry, tent pole replacement stuff is not in the on-line catalogue.
Cost was OK, Can$125 for the lot and that includes nylon tube webbing for the poles to
slide into and eighth inch shock cord to hold things together. The fairleads were 25cents
each at wholesale and I used about 100 of them on four inch centres.
The second point here will tell you why I've called my boat Irish Pennant -- I want to be
able to fix anything with my knife and a hank of light line. Even my mast is held in the
partners with a lashing.
I've always found zippers are the weak link in boat canvas, so instead I use dutchman's
overcoat fastening -- interlocked loops and eyes. (Brion Toss, I think, has a drawing
somewhere showing the setup, but its pretty simple.)
The loops and fairleads between each pair of tent poles are a short 'zipper' instead of a
continuous zip. That's so rigging and unrigging can be controllable in a wind.
I think I've got an improvement here. It's looking good for me so far.
Eric