Help! Need ideas on slippery silnylon floors…

I would get the 70D floor. If you got the 30 and needed to use tyvek anyway, you are not gaining anything. The 30D floor will actually be more prone to sliding if it is on a Tyvek groundcloth vs just on the bare ground. 4oz is not much weight in the grand scheme of things anyway.

Good luck, and please post some picks of you new setup when you get it!

Because of the tiny "claws" of tyvek that grab onto leaves and other debris, I do not like tyvek. A strip of coated nylon just slightly wider than my sleeping bag works fine. The best solution is to use a bivy with a silnylon floor. With both bag and pad on the inside slipping around does not matter. If too hot for bivey, just put it underneath the pad as ground cover.

@Ben I'd be 100% for the 70D floor except from what I can tell the 70D floor will still be pretty slippery. I suppose, worse case, I'll be able to skip the groundcloth and treat the 70D floor to reduce slip.

@Frank I don't see how that would be any improvement- without a different material, a treatment to the floor, or a groundcloth that has a bit of grip the silnylon floored bivy would still be slipping around…

youll be happier in the long run with a stronger floor on any shelter i think

simplifies things if you dont need a ground sheet

I did the anti-slip coating on the outside of the floor on my Scarp 2 and Hogback (30D floors), and it works great. The Hogback had up to 4 rambunctious kids in it at times on a 3 day trip in the mountains, pitched on non-established, forested campsites.

My backyard is a grassy slope, and it's the perfect testing ground for this type of thing. I slide instantly using polycro, plastic, or silnylon as groundsheets. Heavy 70D Golite floors don't slide much, but they're treated with polyurethane on the inside.

Don't forget to do the dots/splotches/strips on the inside floor too.

I think a gloved hand works best to spread the coating–much faster and easier than with a brush.

I've never had a problem with PU-coated silnylon or nylon like GoLite used. I asked about John about it, but shied off when he said that the PU-coated stuff weighed 4x as much as the 30D silnylon, and 2x the 70D.

On my Double Rainbow it seems like the lightest incline and I start sliding, especially on grass. Even when I'm glued to the floor by sticky sleeping mats or moisture, the underlying floor itself starts to slide. I can imagine me knocking out the pole in a mid like the Pyra or tearing a tie down point on a Tarptent.

I decided to go with the 70D and sent payment along to John. I just wanted to make sure there weren't any other options before committing to the heavier floor. Thanks all!

I don't like slippery silnylon floors either. I had a single wall tent with a 30D silnylon floor and the floor would slide at night and we'd both wind up pressed against one of the side walls if we didn't have a perfectly level campsite.

I tried that treatment to paint the floor with silicone & mineral spirits. It worked to make the floor less slippery, but it also made the floor into a dust magnet. Sweeping out the tent didn't work anymore as all the dirt & debris would grip to the floor.

In addition to being slippery, silnylon floors aren't that waterproof (1200mm) so I'm not a fan. PU coated floors are well worth the small increase in weight.

A PU coated floor isn't that much heavier than silnylon….definately not 2-4x. 30D silnylon is 1.1oz before the silicone and about 1.3oz afterwards. 70D PU coated nylon is 2.2oz and presumably 30D PU coated would be around 1.7oz. This weight is worth it IMO for a non slippery and more waterproof floor. Another good floor option is CT3.5K.18 Cuben (1.2oz) or CT5K.18 Cuben (1.5) which seems quite durable and totally waterproof since it's essentially plastic. You wouldn't regret spending the extra for cuben to get a non-slippery, more waterproof floor.

I think I've proved I'm dumb enough to think something like this, so:

Would a pattern of seam Grip dots on the bottom work? At least a little…? It is possible that the grid of dots + your body weight pushing them in may do something? At least in dirt, no?

Dots of Seam Grip / Silicone on the bottom of ones sleeping pad supposedly solves slipperyness issues on the inside of the tent. I'm not sure if it would work on the bottom or not. My guess is that you'd need an awful lot of dots on the bottom, so you may be just as well off to paint it.

Keep in mind that 30D PU nylon is no more than 0.5oz/yd heavier than 30D silnylon. If you start doing stuff like painting it or even adding dots, you start to lose what small weight savings you have. A typical 2 person floor (46" x 84") uses 3 yards of fabric, which is up to 1.5oz heavier in PU over silnylon for the same denier nylon. It's probably more like 1oz difference to use silicone over PU.

If you add 0.5-1oz of Seam Grip/Silicone to the silnylon floor then you've saved almost no weight over PU, done a lot of work and gotten a less waterproof floor. I'm surprised silnylon floors ever caught on. They just kinda snuck into the scene when silicone tents arrived.

Seeing how you've messed with Cuben, Do you think the floors or at least ground sheet (zpacks) would out perform sil given the abrasion resistance issues? Furthermore, are the abrasion issues overblown?

Cuben with the thicker .18 mylar layers (1.2oz CT3.5K.18 or 1.5oz CT5K.18) seems pretty darn durable. I had a large rodent (likely a Marmot) chew on my CT5K.18 Zpacks Blast food bag for presumably a long time. He eventually gave up after making only a tiny hole that was too small to get any food through. I imagine a large rodent would have no trouble chewing through 30D nylon with it's sharp teeth.

So yes, I do think the thicker variants of cuben would outperform 30D nylon from an abrasion standpoint. From a waterproofing standpoint there's no question that cuben is better. I intend to use my current 1.5oz cuben floor for a very long time with no groundsheet.

The lighter variants of cuben (0.33oz – 0.74oz) with the thinner .08 mylar do not work as well as a floor because over time you get tiny pinholes in the cuben which hurts it's waterproofness. You could use a lighter cuben floor + a groundsheet but then that's heavier and more complicated than just using 1.2oz or 1.5oz cuben. I'm never a groundsheet user.

While 1.5oz cuben seems great as a floor material, it is financially tough to justify using it over 30D PU coated nylon which is a good floor material. I've found 30D PU coated nylon (~1.7oz) to be quite waterproof and durable and it costs a lot less than 1.5oz cuben while weighing only a smidge more. A 1.5oz cuben floor is an extra $20/yd or about $60 plus margin for a typical two person tent. Given the choice I'd probably choose the cost savings and go with 30D PU nylon at the penalty of 0.5oz total for a 2 person tent.

With that said, the new 1.2oz cuben (CT3.5K.18) might be the perfect floor material. IMO, it's the lightest floor material that is durable enough to be used without a groundsheet, so it is the lightest floor overall. It's about 0.5oz/yd lighter than 30D PU coated nylon so you can sorta justify the cost expenditure. It's got the same durable mylar layers as 1.5oz cuben, but with a bit less spectra (but still a lot).

Even better might be a lighter still variant of cuben that still uses the heavier mylar. If Cubic Tech paired the amount of spectra used in 0.74oz cuben (2K worth of spectra) with the heavier mylar then they'd have CT2K.18 at roughly 1.0oz/yd. Unfortunately they don't make this, but I bet they easily could if someone wanted to place an order for 99 yards.

I must admit, I didn't quite understood the deal with the 4x PU-coated nylon. I assumed he only stocked a heavier PU nylon, 100D+. The cuben he had was 0.5 oz/yd, which did sound a little on the light side. I'd love to spend the money to get a cuben floor (or shelter!) but I just can't justify it at this point.

I've given him the go ahead and paid up, so I'm not going to press the issue. With folks like me, as imperfect as it is, silnylon usually performs well enough that I don't really mind. When I get the two person Net tent from him next year I'll bring it up again. :)

I've never quite understood why PU nylon is so demonized. Around these parts, PU nylon seems to have a reputation for not lasting. I've seen a lot of threads were someone writes off a tent with a PU nylon floor because it'll go sticky/gummy after a season. I have tents made of PU coated nylon and polyester that are still kicking after 20 years, seeing at least some use every summer for most of those years. I know it happens, but it's obviously not the inevitable end state of PU coated nylon after a year or two…

Great info! Thanks, man.

Aaron,
Had the sleeping pad part of this problem on a tent with a silnylon floor (posted in MYOG), and decided to put some silicone on the bottom of my REI inflatable foam pad.

Chose Permatex sealant, and put on a chevron pattern of about 6-7 lines. Problem solved.

Wondered why your floor was slipping on the ground, then remembered that a number of tents that use variations of the tarptent design do not have the floor stabilized by pulling its corners tightly to the pole tips or stakes that are at the corners of the outer canopy.

With a tent like mine, and the Thru-Hiker silnylon that, although it is not a flat finish, is not a slippery clear coat either, there is no significant movement of the floor on the ground. As said, that is because the corners of the floor are pulled tightly to the outer corners where there are pole tips and stakes (The stakes are there just to anchor the tent, not support it). Posted pix of this tent on MYOG on 8/25/10. Sorry, do not have the link at hand.

IMO, this is the best type of design for sil floors. It is simple and conventional, and keeps the floor taut and anchored with the tent. Per my post, am totally sold on the use of high quality silnylon for floors due to its ability to stretch rather than puncture or abrade, good water resistannce, light weight and resistance to detritus like pitchy pine twigs that tend to get stuck to the bottom of PU coated floors. I understand that there have been problems with silnylon picking up a lot of dust, but haven't had this problem in the Rockies and New England Whites.
Sam