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Hi,

We're just back after a 5 day trip and I noticed that we had a stress on zips issue!

We have a wynnster saturn 9 and I pitch it myself with my twin sons (13yrs) assisting. It's a 2 part pitch with the inner going up first (poles through the sleeves, get it standing up and then peg it down, followed by outer fly sheet, which gets tied onto the poles and fastened onto base with adjustable clips. Then the guy ropes to hold it all down using delta pegs. (I hope that makes sense, I can see me doing it just trying to type it so it makes sense)

The first problem I had was at the front door the attached porch groundsheet just would not stay down with pegs. it just kept rising up and causing a bit of a trip hazzard for my youngest daughter. after the first night I unpegged and tried to adjust the tent on its poles (a lot easier said than done) so as to straighten it up as it looked a bit squint and this did make a difference to the front door floor but only for a sort while, Eventually I used a screw in type peg to hold it down. This also made all the zips easier to close.

Our tent has 2 large bedroom pods which split into 2 making 4 rooms either side of a large living area. The zips on the 2 bedrooms nearest the rear of the tent were no problem but the zip on the bedroom nearest the front door was really pulling tight.

On the last night I noticed that the actual front door of the tent was really pulling tight at one point, so much so that you could see the fabric stretching and although it all held together, I really need to know how to stop this from happening again otherwise its only a matter of time until something goes rip!  It was just above waist height on the same side that the bedroom door zip was too tight?

Can anyone help me with how to prevent this from happening again? I don't open the tent until its all in place and I'm thinking now I should have gone inside to see how things were sitting. Is this what you are supposed to do??

 I think the stress of putting the tent up myself  (DH wasn't with us) meant that I just wanted to get it up and get everything into place. The twins are a great help but there was a huge thunder storm looming closeby and I went hell for leather to get the tent up before it arrived. In actual fact it passed without coming near us.

We are off to france in 3 weeks, so any advice would be most welcome.

Thanks

Donna

Thanks for your reply.

I guess its a bit of trial and error. We pitched our tent at least 8 times last summer and on most times never had any issues. I can recall the kids having a problem with the bedroom zips on one occasion, but we just took a bit of extra care when opening/closing.

The joys of camping eh?!

Not sure about Wynnsters but our Vango has tension straps that you tighten every couple of days. These attach the pegs to the tent and allow you to tighten up the slack that generally appears after a couple of days. If yours has these then make sure that you extend them fully before pegging out, and then tighten them up first one side then the opposite etc. If you don't have these adjustable straps then you could have just been trying to peg out too tightly in the first place?