Bushwalk Australia

My previously reported strength testing did not reach the breaking point for the new polyester and the grey silnylon tent fabrics. While I don't think that loadings beyond 18k (tested) on such small sections of fabric are critical to good tent design, finding the higher load-bearing capacity or the breaking point of these fabrics was more a matter of curiosity. So this brief post explores their relative strength a little more. The test strips were the ones that did not break in the previous post where they reached the maximum rig load of about 18.8kg (including the weight of the bucket). In the following tests, I used a bigger central bucket with two extra buckets hung on each side. The total weight of the buckets was 2kg (1 +2*0.5kg) and this is included in the final load weights. As with the previous testing, 10kg of water was added in one lot and 2kg of water was added with a jug until the fabric broke or the bucket capacity was reached. The silnylon broke at 38kg and the polyester supported 40Kg as shown in the two videos below. Tim

Good stuff Tim, love your methodology which even my puny brain can understand. And thankyou for including more bird songs.

Nice work again Tim.
Ta.

JohnnoMcJohnno wrote:Good stuff Tim, love your methodology which even my puny brain can understand. And thankyou for including more bird songs.

Hi Johnno, thank you and others for the appreciation. I would like to test the tear strength of the fabrics. But I don't like the standard cut-then-pull-apart method as suggested by Franco. It is great for riping straight grain edges in the sewing room, but this is not what our MYOG tents are subjected to with any care while out camping. Sensible designs, with an appropriate attachment of guy-out, peg-out and pole connections that don't create bad stress concentrations to individual fabric fibres should suffice. I think we are mainly interested in preventing the start of a large tear in the first place. In my experience, a short tear is just an inconvenience and will not 'run' even with the loading of a howling wind. Do you have any good ideas for more sensible testing of this attribute? I'll capture some more bird songs for you if you can help. I'll catch them for you anyway as they just break out into song usually when the weather is unstable and I just can't resist recording. Tim

Every major tent company is using a similar fabric tester to the one "I suggested" by I see you know better so I will not bother you any further.