Remember that phrase regarding the top of the tent when you were a kid? The problem being that if you touched it, there would be a rain drip to start where you touched it.
What was the material and why was it a problem? It wasn't silicone impregnated nylon, right? Was it the urethane stuff?
Jbo
if I remember right...ours was canvasOriginally Posted by jbo_c
oh a guess, touching it would give the water someplace to wick through
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Totally cotton canvas... I'm showing my age. Try putting three kids in a canvas tent and tell them "don't touch the sides...." What a nightmare.
PU coated would not do that at all.
I may be slow... But I sure am gimpy.
"Bless you child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other way."
Mrs. Loftus to Huck Finn
We Don't Sew... We Make Gear! video series
Important thread injector guidelines especially for Newbies
Bobbin Tension - A Personal Viewpoint
From yet another OLD guy, Canvas material. Waterproof(Ish) until one of us kids touched it. Then dad got mad & made us sleep under the drip.
We called that "Fun".
When you have a backpack on, no matter where you are, you’re home.
PAIN is INEVITABLE. MISERY is OPTIONAL.
The cotton canvas swelled when it got wet sealing the pores in the fabric. When touched, the surface tension at that point was broken. It was kind of like a vampire. Can't enter until it's invited. Touching the wall was the invitation.
I may be slow... But I sure am gimpy.
"Bless you child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other way."
Mrs. Loftus to Huck Finn
We Don't Sew... We Make Gear! video series
Important thread injector guidelines especially for Newbies
Bobbin Tension - A Personal Viewpoint
LOL!!! I laughed so hard when I read this. I was that kid. Time frame, 1974 or so. I was 13. Boy Scout summer camp at Stokes State Forest in NJ. My dad was helping out supervising in camp and was bunking with me and two other scouts. Raining hard one evening, as we were retiring for the night. My dad instructed me not to touch the wall of the tent. It was darn too tempting. I touched it!!Just couldn't listen, I guess. My finger then made a great picture of a racecar in the moisture coming through the canvas of the tent. I woke up with a soaked sleeping bag. When I woke up I thought I had peed the bag. Dad was not happy!
No wonder I never made it past First Class in scout rank.
SW
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When I was a kid and my family traveled it was allways with a tent. I think that it was an old army tent. It was white about ten by twelve with two foot high side walls. Pole at each end of the tent no floor. I remember some vacations of two weeks in length that the tent never got dry. Rolled up wet it must of been fifty pounds. Dad would put the Coleman stove in the tent to try to dry it. Steam would come of of it on the outside.
boy scout camps still use the canvas style tents on wooden platforms with i think steel but maybe aluminum pols to make a frame (imagine packing one o0f though up *shivers*) you tried not to touch them. Usually you were fine because the one night that it rained was the night that you did wilderness survival so all your gear stayed dry in the tent with no one to touch the fabric above it while you and your cloths got soaked in mud.
I reject your reality and substitute my own
I am going to show my age here...in scouts, we used Army surplus 2 piece pup tents which BUTTONED together along the ridgeline. Even at age 11, I couldn't figure out what kind of magic would keep the water out there, let alone there was not enough room in them for 2 boys not to touch the tent. This was when the pack frames were wood and metal. By the time I had made it into the Senior patrol, we had introduced (that being us boys, not the leaders) plastic tarps for tents. Once the senior patrol (the Aces, troop 700) were camping drier than the leaders, the conversion for the whole troop came pretty quickly...
I still have my little canvas springbar tent. My parents got it for me when I was 13. I remember this one time it was pouring buckets outside the tent and I wanted to see if it really would leak through. I stuck my finger up and touched the tent ceiling above my head. I spent the rest of the night squished to one side of the tent to avoid being water-boarded.
The tent still looks the same as the day I got it. Only difference is I have silicone sealed the roof.
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