Membrane silpoly tarp advise done

[Joost D]

Hi All

I finished my membrane silpoly hex tarp yesterday.

I don’t have any room to test in the garden so I went to the park ;)

Bonded reinforcement patches with elastosil E43. And everything sewn in the hem/felled seam. So stitching goes trough multiple layers plus the E43 coating. I hope this wil hold fine.

Weight 227gram

It’s the first time I ever pitched a tarp with hammock so probably made

a ton of mistakes. I’ll just keep practising :)

I used these small plastic toggles on the 1mm dyneema cord on the tarp ridgeline. They work pretty well and doesn’t slip a bit.

Total weight hammock, tarp, cordage, suspension and stuff sack 873 gram.

[Jerry Adams]

that looks nice

I was just out.  Greater than 20MPH winds.

My guylines to flat felled seams of ridges held no problem

In between I had extra tent stake loops that were just sewn to the body of the fabric, right next to the hem on the edge

red line – the grosgrain tent stake loop

blue line – where it was attached to the body of the tent.

notice that it ripped the hem off.  Call it a perforation.

I’m going to have to add reinforcement for all of those like you did.  I’ll probably just use silicone diluted with mineral spirits because that’s what I have.  And sewn.

[Joost D]

That’s too bad what happened!

I used elastosil E43 because I had it laying around ;)

Thanks for the heads up! Shows hp important it is to reinforce I guess.

[Jerry Adams]

it was fine, those in between loops aren’t really necessary

The side at the front has the ripped out middle tent stake loop

On the left side, it’s still holding.  You can see it’s taking a lot of load so it must be taking load off the corner loops.  This is a weird 5 sided pyramid.

On the right side it’s like a normal pyramid.  There are stakes at the corners and one in the middle that are on a flat felled seam.  In between there are two extra stakes.  You can hardly tell they’re taking any load, but when there’s a gust they seem to help.

[Kevin Babione]

Joost – Your tarp looks great and you’ll really like having the “porch” setup with your trekking poles.  It allows you to see around you while you’re in the hammock.  If you have any spare tarp material laying around you might want to consider making a pair of trekking pole caps like these from ZPacks.  That will allow you to keep your handles up rather than on the ground.  This does three things:

• You can stick the point of your pole in the ground a bit and it keeps it from falling over if it gets windy
• It will keep critters (mice) from chewing on your handles while you sleep
• If you have adjustable poles it can keep water from getting into them when it rains

Ever since I had one of my GG Lightrek handles chewed up while leaning against a tree overnight (it was upright too), I’ve either used them as porch supports (with the caps) or I clip them together with a mini-biner and hang them from my hammock suspension.

[Joost D]

 

That’s a great idea! Never thought about the problems of having them this way, thanks for the tip!

 

[Joost D]

@Jerry, okay so you can still use you’re shelter. How much did you use it? I’m hoping the membrane will last a bit, as it’s so lightweight..

[Jerry Adams]

I forget, I’ve used that a couple years?  At least 50 nights?

I don’t think it really wears out with time.  Maybe UV degradation would gradually weaken it.

The fact that the other points didn’t rip even though I didn’t reinforce them shows it should handle a lot of wind when properly reinforced.

[Jerry Adams]

I fixed it.  Replced the hem that tore out and reinforced the 6 mid panel tent stake looks (that would be 8 on a normal mid)

I don’t think I’ll bother with silicone

I noticed that on some, the stitches that attached the tent stake grosgrain loops was outside of the hem row of stitches.  That would work by itself.  No need for additional reinforcement.  The load from the loop is transferred to two layers of fabric, then the two layers are sewn together transferring all load to one layer of fabric.

Maybe do wider hems, 1/2 inch.

 

[Michael B]

The new tarp looks great! I like to sew corners to a single point so I can have more of a loop, but yours will likely work great – the reinforcements likely won’t do much for you there since you sewed the grosgrain in line with the hems, but no big deal, they will be there if you decide to change your tieouts up at all.

Jerry, I think on your tieouts that ripped, you’d be fine if you run straight stitches in the direction of the tieout. I double up on the material in this area to give the stitches something to grip on, but I don’t silicone those extra layers to the main tarp body. It held up in wind for me fine, but ymmv. I was using it on a 9×9 flat tarp fwiw. It caught a lot of wind last trip, hence I turned it into a single wall mid, more because I was frustrated setting up the big tarp in the wind, not because anything failed.

[Joost D]

I was doubting tieouts till the last moment. I did this because I could easily add extra tie outs in to the reinforcement patches.

The hem is made with the reinforcement rolled in. So a lot of layers there and a bonded layer as well. Don’t know if this was necessary, but it does give me an option to add tieouts later in if I need them.

Is you’re mid also made of membrane?

[Michael B]

Membrane PU4000. It is supposed to be more delicate than the regular stuff but I picked it up as remnant 2nds, so it is like a $25 experiment that became 2 experiments for the cost of my time.

the only problem it has suffered was me throwing a stake through it. I fixed  it with tenacious tape. NBD.

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