Weird tent design idea Tipi tunnel

[Edward John M]

I have here a home assembled hubbed gothic arch pole set.

I bought a tent pole set on a clearance; separated the component pieces and re-assembled as a single large pole set using a 9mm 145 degree Easton joiner.

I had this idea of reinforcing a cheap Coleman tent but i have abandoned that idea.

I now have this idea of using it as the centre pole in a tipi style tent but realise it isn’t strong enough/rigid enough to do so.

Also I cannot seee how to use a hubbed set in any way other than internally, how would you feed the hub though a sleeve externally>??

So I had this visual of a tent something like a Eureka Timberline pop into my skull using an additional 2 sets of poles with arch connectors to give me a tall but skinny tunnel tent sleeping along the long axis. I need to stand up to dress these days due to severe arthritis in the hips and the corrective surgery waiting list is a few years long still.

Thoughts/ Crtitique?

I wish I could draw so I could put down on paper the picture in my head

[rmeurant]

Pretty impossible to follow from the verbal description. I suggest you make a few sketches, photograph them with your smart phone, and upload the images. If you mean the struts for a pyramid of whatever frequency, then surely the tent could just have loops to attach to the external frame, each loop could he made from two velocred ties, but it would take some time to pitch. Straight lines (poles) regularly distributed around an axis form a cone, if coincident at a point, and otherwise a rotational hyperboloid, like the straight line geometry of those massive cooling towers for nuclear reactors. The later would be better for wind resistance, as it would develop surfaces of opposite curvature, but almost surely impractical.

[Edward John M]

Here is a link to a classic Gothic arch tent from Vango

http://www.vango.co.uk/gb/tents/1006-talos-400.html

Imagine this wider rather than longer and all arches of equal height

[Roger Caffin]

I THINK I understand their Tension Band System, and (if i am right) it certainly would help. I was using it 50 years ago on a light-weight dome I made, and it worked then quite well in some bad weather. But I would add a lot of external guy ropes to all those poles! Probably double guys, considering the height of the tent.

Cheers

[Edward John M]

What i have is a pair of these hubbed sections with the 145 degree arach at the join

 

Pictured inside a biggish Coleman dome

[Roger Caffin]

The dome I built ages ago had a hub at the top as well. But, and this is MY key overiding point, the poles were sleeved into the fly. Without the sleeving the tent would have been a total failure; with the sleeving it worked.
The sleeves were on the inside and the poles were inserted from the inside. Yeah, sure watching me struggle inside the tent getting the FOUR poles into the hub was always amusing for the spectators. In hindsight I should have had the sleeves on the outside of the tent and inserted the poles from the corners into the centre. But those poles were solid, not hollow, and were not held together.

So the hubs are interesting, but how you use them is more important imho.

Cheers

[Sam Farrington]

I did not do much better with your original description. But the Vango link helped.
While it seemed counter-intuitive, I have found that the gothic arches, even with less arching, tend to sway just as much as un-hubbed parabolic arches. So agree with Roger about the need for side-guying.

Roger shared with me some years back that one of the considerations in his 3 elbow pole design was more room for him and his partner. For a tunnel tent that seems definitely so. For a solo tent, maybe not quite as much.

There was a post here a few years ago of a MYOG side entry solo tunnel, done with one parabolic arch pole at the front, and one of equal length at the back of the tent.
https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/103317/
The Swiss company, Exped, has done a number of these, usually with a third arch pole that crosses the parallel arched pole at their apexes. http://www.exped.com/usa/en/product-category/tents

For some reason, there was not much comment on the thread, possibly because the design is not terribly stable without the cross pole that Exped adds. But it also adds a lot of weight, even with carbon poles.

Sometimes it has been helpful to build a scale model of the frame, using music wire for the poles, and sign or cork board for a base into which the ends of the music wire can be stuck. But time has marched on, and computer programs appear to be the order of the day for tent designing. Since my clock stopped some time ago, there is no problem using the old methods.

[Roger Caffin]

Sometimes it has been helpful to build a scale model of the frame, using music wire for the poles,

Just so.
Cheers

[Edward John M]

Pretty much the original Berghaus tunnel from the 70s, the picture in my head is similar but of course much taller and with 3 sets of poles, obviously not for quick and light travel but more for basecamp use.

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