I'm not really a "bushcrafter" in the strictest sense but do some wild camping in some pretty remote spots and, as such, I like to travel light and so when I got a good deal on a Vaude Power Lizard SUL 1 - 2 person tent (who on earth thought up that name?) I went for it. Most of my camping looks like this:
As you can see the ground isn't the most even and it is also generally very soft, often I'm pegging into sphagnum moss rather than solid earth and, in truth, solid earth is not something there is an excess of until you dig down about 4 feet. Vaude do supply pegs with the tent but they are tiny titanium things which are, probably, great on soil but I need something rather bigger: here are the Vaude pegs compared to what I actually use:
I suspect that, in part, the Power Lizard is a marketing exercise as it is, or certainly was, the lightest 2 man tent on the market and so they had to shave off a few grams here and there to meet this marketing requirement, hence the pegs. Another area where they've knocked off a gram or two is with the guys that secure each end of the tent. The tent has a single hoop pole plus two short upright poles at each end to lift the ends and give foot and head room. It works well but the guy attached to the top and bottom of the upright poles is a single length of line and this makes getting a tight pitch, especially on rough ground which features high on my list of camping spots, difficult or impossible. These are images of the single guy:
As you can see this doesn't work especially well but, I guess, helped with getting the record of the lightest double skin 2 person tent on earth, or something. You can also see that there is some yellow line joined on to the Vaude supplied line and the reason for this is that the Vaude supplied line terminates in a little plastic ring through which the peg must be pushed. This is OK if you use the tiny Vaude pegs but my larger pegs simply will not fit and so I have to add another bit of line with a bigger "hole" for my pegs. This photo shows the Vaude guys and the little plastic ring with my modification added, as you can see my bigger pegs are never going into that little bit of plastic:
The obvious solution here is simply to remove the Vaude guy for the upright poles and replace it with two individual guys with line-loks to allow for using a variety of pegging options and also to give more flexibility in getting a tighter pitch on rough ground. Yesterday I took a little time to make the modification and do some back garden testing and it worked out quite well:
Even in the back garden I think it helped tighten the pitch a bit as with the one pole design there is quite a bit of fabric to flap about but it was very windy indeed yesterday and while there was some movement the end I modified first seemed tighter than the unmodified end. You can see that I used two pegs, one for each guy line, but with the line-loks it would be quite easy to use a single peg for both lines, two pegs made sense while I was experimenting and also show quite clearly the two separate lines.
While at it I also did the two additional guy lines that are used to stabilize the main pole - they extend at right angles to the axis of the tent just to give some additional stability in bad weather. Vaude don't even supply pegs for these guys as they say they are only necessary in very bad weather but they are just lines with a fixed loop on the end so I replaced them with bright yellow and somewhat thicker lines (because I trip over them all the time) with line-loks on them just to allow for adjustment. This is the full tent with the modification applied only to one end and before the side guys were done, just to give an overview:
As you can see the ground isn't the most even and it is also generally very soft, often I'm pegging into sphagnum moss rather than solid earth and, in truth, solid earth is not something there is an excess of until you dig down about 4 feet. Vaude do supply pegs with the tent but they are tiny titanium things which are, probably, great on soil but I need something rather bigger: here are the Vaude pegs compared to what I actually use:
I suspect that, in part, the Power Lizard is a marketing exercise as it is, or certainly was, the lightest 2 man tent on the market and so they had to shave off a few grams here and there to meet this marketing requirement, hence the pegs. Another area where they've knocked off a gram or two is with the guys that secure each end of the tent. The tent has a single hoop pole plus two short upright poles at each end to lift the ends and give foot and head room. It works well but the guy attached to the top and bottom of the upright poles is a single length of line and this makes getting a tight pitch, especially on rough ground which features high on my list of camping spots, difficult or impossible. These are images of the single guy:
As you can see this doesn't work especially well but, I guess, helped with getting the record of the lightest double skin 2 person tent on earth, or something. You can also see that there is some yellow line joined on to the Vaude supplied line and the reason for this is that the Vaude supplied line terminates in a little plastic ring through which the peg must be pushed. This is OK if you use the tiny Vaude pegs but my larger pegs simply will not fit and so I have to add another bit of line with a bigger "hole" for my pegs. This photo shows the Vaude guys and the little plastic ring with my modification added, as you can see my bigger pegs are never going into that little bit of plastic:
The obvious solution here is simply to remove the Vaude guy for the upright poles and replace it with two individual guys with line-loks to allow for using a variety of pegging options and also to give more flexibility in getting a tighter pitch on rough ground. Yesterday I took a little time to make the modification and do some back garden testing and it worked out quite well:
Even in the back garden I think it helped tighten the pitch a bit as with the one pole design there is quite a bit of fabric to flap about but it was very windy indeed yesterday and while there was some movement the end I modified first seemed tighter than the unmodified end. You can see that I used two pegs, one for each guy line, but with the line-loks it would be quite easy to use a single peg for both lines, two pegs made sense while I was experimenting and also show quite clearly the two separate lines.
While at it I also did the two additional guy lines that are used to stabilize the main pole - they extend at right angles to the axis of the tent just to give some additional stability in bad weather. Vaude don't even supply pegs for these guys as they say they are only necessary in very bad weather but they are just lines with a fixed loop on the end so I replaced them with bright yellow and somewhat thicker lines (because I trip over them all the time) with line-loks on them just to allow for adjustment. This is the full tent with the modification applied only to one end and before the side guys were done, just to give an overview:
