I set up my CR2 inside today to see what weight could be trimmed. I observed 6 fabric loops inside the tent that run along underneath the main pole. These loops have no apparent purpose but I do find one handy to hang my glasses from at night. I suppose that a gear loft could be strung from these loops but none is offered from MSR (maybe they do for the Hubba Hubba?) and even if one was I can't see myself adding the weight.
I cut off three of these loops leaving the two near the top of the tent (at either end of where the white fabric is) and leaving one more above my head so I can hang my glasses. The three that I trimmed off weighed it at a whopping 0.7g on my scale (combined). Hmm….hardly worth it. I would need to trim off over 100 similarly heavy objects to save an ounce of this tent. So potentially 1.4g of weight savings is available by trimming off these loops and I realized half of that.
There are also two more tabs inside the tent at the top of each zipper. These look a bit beefier than the previously discussed tabs, but they still don't likely weigh more than 0.5g each or 1g total. I didn't cut these off because they are useful to pull on when you are undoing the zipper.
Besides the tabs, I considered trimming 1 or 2 of the corner pockets out of the tent. The CR2 has a mesh pocket in each corner which is a lot. I could definitely get by with just 2 inside of 4. However, I figured the potential savings are only in the 2-3 gram range (0.1oz) per pocket, so I let them remain since that might raise eyebrows if I ever have a warranty issue and the pocket capacity might come in handy someday.
On the outside of the body, I noticed that the two strap loops that the cross pole fits into aren't entirely being used. The strap is sewn in a loop, but the bottom half of the loop is slack so you could trim this. This strap looks a bit more substantial than the loops inside, but it still doesn't likely weigh more than a gram and it does come in handy for clipping the cross pole in and out. I think you could safely trim about half the fabric away and you would actually increase the functionality of the tent because you wouldn't have to pull the loop out of the way to attach the fly, but I opted to leave this alone for now because the weight savings were trivial and I want to think about it a bit more before making such a permanent alteration to the tent.
So in total I spent about 20 minutes working with the tent and saved 0.7g….no so great. This is making my Ti stakes look amazing as they will save 6 x 4g or 24g…nearly an ounce.
