Simple Hack for Polycro footprint

This is an excellent hack, will give it a try with my Xmid. Question – is your floor silnyl or DCF?

I reinforced corners with packaging tape and once I pulled on it and the corner ripped off.  But I’ve kept using it because it doesn’t matter

The reason I put the packaging tape on the corners is because the polycro ripped off at the corner where I pulled on it.  Again, it didn’t matter, but it developed some more rips so I retired it.  Polycro doesn’t have a long lifetime but it’s cheap to replace.

So we are buying UL tents, and then basically making the floor thicker. Just sayin’.

That is logical

One thing about groundsheet is you can shake it off easier, and dry it. Polycryo doesn’t absorb (or adsorb) water like nylon or polyester

Helps with small pokies too.

On beat down provincial sites where rain creates water running under the tent, I use my water bottle to prop up the edge of the polycro at the running water ingress and it all flows under the groundsheet, so the floor dries out much faster later.  The polycro weight is probably less than the water that would have been absorbed and I would have had to carry

Has anyone tried taping a penny to each corner of the polycro? This will add a bit of controllable tossing weight to it (10g). I’ve read somewhere, somebody tried this and it worked for them.

If it’s windy I just use a stick or rock on the corners and remove them when the tent is up

Yes, DCF floor, and so the 3M packaging tape sticks well, but not too strongly to remove safely.

I would also chose to use an added ground-cloth with Durston’s UL silpoly floor, given where I often camp; but taping to the silpoly would not be the same.

Yes, I’ve used perimeter rocks & sticks with polycro (and other) ground clothes many times during windy setup with prior, more conventional tents; but the non-rectangular parallelogram floor of the X-mids plus the inventively, usefully skewed orientation of the bathtub floor relative to the fly makes proper positioning of a properly sized and shaped groundsheet particularly fraught for Xmids relative to setting up “normal” floors and fly orientations.

Of course, Dan sells reasonably priced, reasonably light foot prints that connect into proper positioning with the skewed parallelogram of Xmids, but those are nonetheless heavier and more costly than just-good-enough-in-my-usage polycro.

I have 2 Xmids.  You might want to give this a try, it overcomes the guesswork caused by the geometry of the tent.

I lay down the polycro in the best spot to avoid roots and exposed rocks, weight the corners with a rock if needed due to wind, then align the fly by first placing a  short side corner which is not the vestibule right at the polycro corner (this location the fly and footprint corner locations are the same) and peg it, then align that short side with the polycro and peg the other short side corner (the only part of the fly that runs parallel to the floor), then finally lay out the rectangle and peg the other 2 corners.

In my experience after many nights in these tents this is much faster than Dan’s recommended method and does a much better job of ensuring the floor will avoid roots, rocks and protrusions because it starts with laying out the polycro visibly avoiding obstacles and then installs the fly in a way that doesn’t require any guesswork caused to the Xmids parallelogram floor geometry