gear nerds: a gear nerd is someone who frets over the cost and performance of something that does little and costs much, i and others are interested in 'real life' reviews of the one piece of outdoor gear that could cost £500 and could - as we have seen over the last weekend - make or break a trip.
i know its slightly mawkish, but there is only this interest because of the total lack of four-season tent reviews in the outdoor press. go on, look around for comparative reviews of 4 season tents, can you find one thats been published in high, trail, tgo, climber or any other magazine or internet site? the only comments you see are 'looks good' or 'might be a bit heavy for backpackers'. nothing that tells me whether a mountain hardware tent copes with wind better than a north face tent or vice versa and very little that says i could save £200 and buy a storm shield 4 season tent and get the same performance as my quasar.
the folk coming back from buttermere are invaluable as they have experience of what happens when a tent 'fails' and what 'fails' first and in what conditions. its not sufficient to say "they all failed, end of story" because some tents stayed up much longer than others and some tents appear more 'recoverable' than others even after failing.
marks' experience with lightwave is also very useful to future buyers, what will TN say? which company will turn round and say "tough shit, didn't you see a weather forecast?", will any manufacturers say that the wind speeds were not within what they class as UK four-season conditions?
if this thread was taking up four pages gouing on about how uncomfortable i feel in my windstopper fleece then the 'gear nerd' label would stick, but tents, especially £500 four-season tents, are serious business, we were lucky that this event took place at low altitude when folk had somewhere to go. what would be thinking now if the failures had taken place at 3,000ft in the cairngorms in march, 18 hrs walk from shelter and all possesions lost? when they fail we need to know why and which performance parameter did they hit - if any.
I think the point already made was that in 6/8 cases the main failure mode was pegs failing to retain attachment to the ground!
I had nice new shiney Terra Nova Easton aluminium pegs. Unfortunately, whilst they might be very strong if you try to bend them their shiney gucciness was clearly not was needed under the conditions.
When we put the tents up, the winds were fairly tame and the forecast was for high winds on the fells. That and the fact that it was already dark and p***ing down meant that nobody bothered to weigh down their pegs with rocks. It was amusing to see that we'd all checked the wind direction however since all the tents were in nice parallel rows.
In the other case, one piece of plastic snapped which led to a bent pole and the other was taken down with a bent pole before anything more serious could have happened.
I prefer the term <i>gear geek</i> but I don't mind if you call me a nerd, i'm not ashamed of it. Either way, my interest was caught by the title of this thread because it is interesting to see how good the various tents actually were. The fact that they all failed, in a valley, in England, is interesting in itself. It tells us that even if we buy a quasar, we should not expect it to keep us safe in all conditions we might experience, even if we are still in the UK and not camped at any great height. The fact that pegs failed first on most tents, mostly due to poor ground, is also interesting; we don't tend to pay as much attention to pegs as other aspects of our tents. It would be interesting to know what state the various tents would have been in if they had not been uprooted. This, I guess, is what prompted the original questions. We (the people who were not there) know now that this question can't be answered because all the tents did uproot, but was it so bad to ask? Deciding when to abandon a trip - walk out early from a multi-night backpack for example - is dificult, often because you don't know exacly how good your gear is (will it last the night?). So trying to learn from other peoples experiences of extreme weather seems entirely sensible to me. So if anybody can offer any more insight please do.
Just goes to show you can't beat a basha tied to trees, personally I wouldn't spend £500 on a tent no matter how much people raved about it, I can quite honestly say hand on heart, that I have never lost one basha even in conditions equal or worse than (from what I have heard) Buttermere.
Lets face it no tent, no matter how much it cost or how well designed it was, would have survived, Tents are nothing more than box kites with zips, held down by 8" tent pegs and no rope.
So it is academic as to which one lasted the longest, if you were in it you still wouldn't have got a good nights sleep rolling over and over the field, I suppose you could be satisfied with the fact that maybe it was less stressful being rolled in an £80 tent instead of a £500 tent
and it isn't about the design of the tent if you set your tent up and didn't peg it it would be off at the slightest gust of wind.
it's the pegs that were holding them down, a bit like if you have bald tyres on your car, "ohhhhh I skidded" there's a shock
Derek, If you had tied your basha to a tree you would have had a branch or the top of the tree land on you, yer basha may have beeen fine but not the helpless soul trapped underneath. ;-)
Wet?WET! Drowned more like, given conditions at the weekend! Only safe place was in a stone barn, and even that was looking decidedly dodgy at times LOL!!
its still a sensible question, in this case the data is a bit obscured by the fact that it was dark and most people said 'sod it, i'm off' before their tent sailed off into the distance.
theres a big difference between a tent that failed at 4pm in a 30mph wind and a tent that failed at 10pm in a 70mph wind, like theres a big difference in a car that hits an object at 30mph and 'fails' and a car that survives an impact at 45mph, all cars are tested to destruction, but they don't just put 'failed' on the label and leave it at that. the data is used to build a series of safe usage parameters that sell the tent or car to its target market, thats the information we want.
a submarine has a depth rating at which it will fail, but that doesn't mean they tootle along on the surface for fear of being crushed.
i'm interested because i, unlike you, have a use for the data, i remain very surprised that two terra nova tents 'failed' in a valley in the UK, although securing a tent to the ground is its weakest point, it might cancel out the 'four-season' label if despite the structure of the tent staying in one piece the tent flies around the campsite, this is obviously no use to anybody.
if the information is of no use to you, fine, but some are interested, you may have an interest in the breaking load of climbing ropes or the reserve petrol tank capacity of 1990 ford escorts, i don't get in your way, please don't get in mine.
My Voyager was just pegged and there was nothing in it to weigh the inner down. My guess is that when the pegs went, the geodesic structure of the inner made a much better kite than the flysheet which also has additional pegs to hold it down.
Were the inner weighed down, I suspect that the inner may have been saved though maybe with poles somewhat like Robert's and that I'd have been joining the crew cutting the flysheet off the barbed wire...
The problem is, if your attachments to the ground are failing then I think you realistically only have two choices:
a) Take your tent down whilst you still can.
b) Let the wind take your tent down for you.
If anybody else can think of something else I'd be interested.
In this instance, I think the rigid and bombproof construction of the Voyager and Super Quasar were actually more of a hindrance than a help since their rigidity makes them fantastic kites rather than just allowing them to bend over in the wind like a something like a tree would.
I guess that if you don't like your tent bending over you in high winds, something geodesic is better than something more flexible. Whilst the geodesic remains "upright" longer, when it does fail it will fail hard (e.g. breaking poles, torn fabric) rather than soft. I think of the analogy as being hit by bending over bouncy castle walls versus being hit by a collapsing brick wall!
If we'd have been prepared for the hurricane winds then the data on which tents survived the longest may have been completely different.
The main problem is that the "data" you can gather from the weekend is very very imprecise precisely because this wasn't a controlled experiment and everybody set their stuff up differently... Therefore, since all the initial conditions were different, all of the outcomes can't be compared.
Also, the nature of the "data" is qualitative rather than quantitative since there were no actual measurements being taken. That I think is the main reason why you are getting results that you are finding hard to come to terms with.
Oh, and I'm using "data" in inverted commas as an admission of the lack of measurement/precision rather than any particular attempt to be sarkie - that's just the scientist in me...
i know what you mean, but subjective anecdotal evidence is far better than none, actually i think its very useful in itself as i'm very interested in how people saw their tents and how they felt when either the tent failed around them or they felt it was time to leave. i personaly am hugely attached to my quasar, its my home from home, nothing has even so much as scratched it in terms of the shelter its given me in some appaling, frightening weather. its my saftey blanket, i know that i'll be safe if i can just crawl inside it. what would the emotional effect be of having it fail or to leave it to the mercy of a hurricane is beyond me, it is more precious to me than my car despite costing a 1/30th of what my car cost me, i could walk out of my house tomorrow and not look back, but to leave my quasar...
so what will those who lost tents - that weren't insured or those that will be replaced by manufacturers - do, are new tents ordered, cheaper, the same or more technical? will they just say 'sod it' and stay in bunkhouses and club huts from now on?
for me, a tent is more than fabric and poles, but the fabric and poles are still very important.
