A couple years ago I bought a cheapy 10x15 pop up tent from an importer out of Texas. It was for a specific show, and I've used it only a few times. The frame is gosh-awful and difficult to put up, but the canopy for it is a polyethylene coated fabric and sheds water like a duck's back and doesn't leak. The top is way better the the EZ-Up tops, and the frame is way chintzier than a cheap EZ-Up frame.
I have a couple extra EZ-Ups, and the peak height on the imported tent and the EZ-Ups are the same. So I'm eyeballing these and debating if I can take the EZ-Up 10x10s apart and create a 10x15 EZ-Up frame, which should go up a lot easier than the imported clunker, and use the 10x15 canopy from the imported one on the new frame. Yeah, I'm cheap and trying to get something better than what I have now. If it works, my additional cost is zip.
Has anyone done something like this, or am I just being creative in the wrong arena? BTW, as far as I can tell, nothing would be irreversible if it didn't work except for losing about a day's worth of work total to take frames apart and then put them back the way they were.
Replies
Richard,
Check out Canopies by Fred. They have a rain gutter to connect two tents that actually works.
Lois
This project is to take half of one frame and connect it to the other one. It would involve removing the legs off one end of one frame, removing two legs and struts off one half of the other frame, and bolting the two frames together to make a 15 foot long frame rather than strapping two together for a 20 footer. I used to have a 20 foot space at Penrod and would zip-tie two frames together, and found out one year what happens when it rains heavy with no gutter between =8-O. The end result on this is a 15 foot pop up with 4 legs and 2 center peaks.
The current 15 foot frame is just flat terrible and almost impossible for one person to raise it. For all the faults of an EZ-Up, they do go up rather easily and that is due to relatively good tolerance on the fittings which don't bind. The imported frame sounds like a dissonant wind chime being shaken as you take it out of the carry bag.