How to do tents

This page is an overview of how our volunteers put up and take down tents. To see prices and more photos, go to Tent, Table & Chair Rentals.

All members get the delivery/pick-up schedule via email from Charles Stackhouse. Usually we meet at 790 White Farm Road on Mondays and Fridays about 8:45 a.m. for a 9:00 a.m. departure, but weather and other considerations can affect this, so check email before going out. There is no sign-up. Just come if you can.

General Info

Our tent system is flexible in terms of length, adaptable to different environments, with relatively few parts. The legs are six-foot poles and the grid for the top is made with 10-foot poles. All our tents are 20 feet wide because two 10-foot poles meet to form the ridge. You can see that this tent is 40 feet long because the sides have four 10-foot sections, indicated by the four red lines.

The white tent trailer has compartments for all the tent components.

Tent components

This is a three-way connector. We use three of these on each end. On the ridge, the short leg (the one pointing up in this photo) connects to the ridge. On the sides, as shown to the right, the short leg connects to the horizontal side of the tent.

This is a four-way connector. We've heard all the jokes you can imagine about three- and four-ways.

We have several styles of wood blocks. In the far-left photo, if we wanted to put two tents together, we could put two legs in the big holes and stakes in the smaller holes. The handle of the stake faces the pole.

When we can’t drive stakes, such as when we’re on pavement or thick gravel, we use buckets of water.

Putting up a tent

Identify where the ridge should be. Lay 10-foot poles in a grid on the ground. Here’s an example of a 20x30 tent, not to scale, with the ridge shown in red. Every pole here is 10 feet long.

Add the connectors. Here the purple symbols represent three-ways and the green ones are four-ways.

Add six-foot poles (shown in black) for the legs.

Here’s what it looks like when we’re laying out the poles.

Usually three or four people build the ridge, and someone else gets a long piece of line to weave among the joints and tie the ridge together. Then we put the rest of the grid, excluding the legs, together.

Put the tarp on. Secure the bungees on the four corners before tying in the middle. Don’t pull them tight!

Lift one side of the tent and put the legs in. Do the same on the other side. Confirm the tent is where it should be. Someone should look down the length and make sure the legs are lined up.

How we secure the legs depends on the surface. If it’s on the ground we drive stakes, if it’s on concrete we use buckets of water, and if it’s on a wood deck we drive screws into the wood. Usually each corner leg has two stakes and the legs in the middle get one, but we often adjust that based on the forecast. If there’s an immovable object near the tent, like a building or tree, we tie the tent to that, especially if high winds are forecast.

We secure the spikes to the tent using a knot called the trucker’s hitch.

We cover the stakes with pool noodles.

Taking down a tent

Put the pool noodles back in their boxes on the front shelf of the trailer.
If the tent has stakes, pull them up. The photo to the right shows our stake-puller-upper. Wrap the line around the stake. Put stakes back in their bin in the trailer.
Untie the bungees along the length of the tent.
Lift one side of the tent off its legs and put that on the ground. Do the same thing on the other side.
Put the legs in their bin in the trailer.
Untie the remaining bungees.
One person on each end grabs the tarp at the center. Pull the tarp to one side. By gripping the center, once it hits the ground it’s already folded in half once. Fold it in half again, then fold that in half, and then roll it up.
Untie the line holding the ridge together and take the grid apart. Put everything back into the trailer.