17 tents

[jimh]

ok so my living room is rather cluttered right now. i ordered and received 17 new 3 man tents from colemans this past week. now we need to go through the old ones and hand off any that are still useable and fill the trailer with these new ones. we have not replaced any tents over the last 10 yrs and trust me these little maggots work them over pretty well! ;D

here's what the new ones look like:




without the rain fly:

[Jack]

Jimh, that's quite a step up in tents, since I was a Boy Scout.
We used GI surplus shelter halves, and GI surplus squad tents. The squad tent was a pyramid type tent with a pole in the middle, that was used for 8 or 10 kids. Those were pretty good tents, except they were rather hot in the summer- not much ventilation, other than the door.
We used the shelter half when we had to carry out own tentage. Let's say the shelter half was a minimal style shelter.
Both, of course, were heavy olive drab canvas. And as dark inside as a coal mine.

[jimh]

jack we went back and forth on what to buy as far as quality. these colemans tend to be pretty durable but by no means are they what you would consider high quality. after talking about it we felt that no matter how you preach to these scouts, they are still kids and are going to be rough on stuff. so we went with what appears to be a good design and fair quality for a really decent price and bought a lot of them. we were adament about a tent design that had the rain fly go down near the ground after our fiasco this past spring where the design of the other tents allowed wet snow to pile and accumilate along the sides and eventualy pulling the tents down on top of the scouts in the middle of the night ;D
we got 17 of these tents delivered for under 1,200.00, not a bad price.

[bounce]

Thats does seem a decent deal you got there.

[jimh]

they listed for around 79.00 and change, we got them at a discout for about 65.00 a piece plus tax and they shipped free. (250 lb of shipping). they go that route for the tax exempt groups opposed to not charging the tax because aparently the paper work to get all the tax exemp info is a pain in the ass for them so they just side step the issue and drop the shipping cost.

[Jack]

Sure does seem like a good deal.
I'd have to agree that a middle of the road tent would be wise with a group of kids.

[klsm54]

My Boy Scout Troop had the same 2 piece Army Surplus tents as Jack used. Of course nobody had yet heard of nylon tents, mosquito netting or shock cords, at least not in my tiny hometown.

We used these tents for all of our weekend excursions but were lucky enough to have larger, probably 6' x 8', canvas wall tents provided for us at the Boy Scout camp where we went for our week long summer camp. Still no bug screens though.

[jimh]

per my summer camp report earlier in July, these are what we are issued to use at summer camp: