The Near-Perfect Tent: Design and Build a Recycled Tent

Step 4 Raising New Tent Pieces From the Ashes of the Old

There are a lot of ways to lay out and cut or make these six basic parts, but I'll go through the one that worked great for me. Know that when you're making a Frankentent, laying out, and "cutting out" your pieces can be a pain in the foot because the cloth won't lie flat and it's odd-sized. But there's an easy way to make very precise, attractive new pieces from older-n-effed-up scraps and such:

--Orchestra in, and Crescendo--

Make a simple frame set to the dimensions of each piece. Then lightly stretch and clamp some cloth pieces across the frame, mark the edges, and cut out the piece.
The frame should be adjustable/re-assembleable so that you can re-set its dimensions for different pieces.

Once your frame is set up, you can stretch the old tents' cloth across it, pinning or clamping it taught, but not overly so. If a single scrap won't cover the full dimensions, sew as many as you need to together until you can fully cover the frame.

Think of this as making a large, funky stretcher for a painting and lightly pulling a canvas--one that might need pieces added to it--over it.
(You may want to cut your doors into these panels once they're done and still in the frame. See steps 5-6 for details. )
--decrescendo--

The frame can be made out of any material that's long and thin and won't flex much. My basement (a trove in its own right I guess) had some 3/8" X 1" X 8' aluminum flatstock in it and it worked really well...so well, that when I make my next tent I plan to try to get ahold of something like it again (I moved). Stiffish rebar would work, as would 1 X 3s in a pinch.

You'll need as many clamps as you can lay ahold of. I had a bunch of spring clamps from other projects, so I used those. If you don't have clamps you could use bolts w/wingnuts to hold a wooden frame together, and thumb-tack the cloth to it...or something else; use your imagination here...

...though as an aside, friends, sometimes you just want the right tools for the job dammit, so try to lay ahold of something slender and strong like the flatstock, and Furthermore, I encourage you to splurge on a sack of spring clamps if you don't have any--6 big ones and six small ones--b/c life w/out an adequate supply of clamps is a slack and cold thing indeed. Use your projects to justify spending money on tools. You'll get into a rewardingly vicious cycle where you buy tools to make things and then need to justify the expense of those tools by making more things that you'll need other tools to make and on and on until like me, you become your little family-neighborhood-and peer group's tool library--something which often garners gifts of alcohol and baked goods in addition to the more rewarding ones of friendship and diy comraderie...

Anyhoo, my frame, pictured below, is made from a couple of pieces of flatstock combined with the kitchen table, which I lengthened using an 8' board.

SO:
Just set the frame to the dimensions of the piece you need, stretch the material over it, patching in more cloth as needed, then use a sharpie or a fabric pen to trace the piece's cut lines along the edge of the frame.

A Final Thought Here:
Aside from environmental and economic ones, there's no reason why you couldn't make the tent out of entirely new materials using these same directions, so go for it if that's the itch you want to scratch. I strongly encourage you to reuse existing crap though--the closer to free you can get the greater the fun! and yeah, it's a bit more ethical. That said, I'd personally like to have a one-person stealth-camping tent for solo paddling/private property camping and if I can't find a camo junker to refab I'll have to buy the material new...

See the pictures for more directions and details.