So so one of our viewers recently asked us to show a video uh about how we set up the play. Do uh belt tent and we’re going to do that right now, and we’re also going to show you near the end a way to fold it up really efficiently, because we struggled with that a little bit when we first got the tent, and now we can fold it up. So there’s actually some spare room in the duffel bag that it came in so yeah. Here we go so something we’ve kind of learned to do is when we fold up the tent, we like to put it in a way that we know which way the entrance is on it, and that way we can orientate it in the direction we want to go.

So what I do is I put our accessories and whatnot in the same end of the tent uh that the door is on, because you can’t really tell when it’s folded up which way the door is, and it’s really nice to be able to roll this out of the duffel bag and in the direction uh that the door is gonna go, so you don’t have to turn that whole tent around once it’s spread out. So I’ve got a few accessories in here. I’m just going to get out of here extra tarp sleeping kit, I’m going to take all our whoops, I’m going to take all our pegs out and everything pulls bag so um.

I know I want the the door. I think we’ll put the door right here, so I’m gonna orientate the door in that direction and instead of trying to struggle this out of the bag, I’m just gonna roll the bag over and pull it off. Okay, just gonna roll this to one end over here we always put a tarp down just protect a little more keeps things from poking into the pool, and it’s a good idea to match the size of your tarp to the tent, because if you have the tent out um, if you have the tarp out a long ways from the tent water’s, just gonna collect from the rain and go in under the floor of the tent, so we actually tuck the tarp in once.

We’re done another thing. You kind of want to pay attention to it’s, not that critical. If you have a tall enough chimney, but we like to have the stove jack generally on the side that is away from the wind so that the wind carries smoke and potential sparks away from from the tent. So what I’m doing is I’m just spreading out the floor of the tent? It doesn’t I don’t have to pull out the walls or anything just have to get it approximately spread out in a circle, because when you peg it it’ll circularize, just fine.

So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re just going to pin down the perimeter of the tent and to do that, we’re going to use the wire style pegs. This comes with the tent comes with two different types of peg raven, and this is the one you want to use on the perimeter because it will be the least force if the wind comes up. So you want to use the the smallest pegs for that and what I want to do when I’m pegging the perimeter just to keep the tent as round as possible.

Uh is I’ll, peg opposite sides, so I’ll start with the two far sides of the tent. The nice thing about these wire pegs is that you can generally just push them in by hand or with your foot, but there’s a lot of ice out here today, so I’m gonna have to tap them in a bit and since it’s just a demo, I might not even poke him in all the way, but good enough for now so the opposite side. So, like I say, you always want to um peg opposite sides, and what that does is it keeps the tent round? Let me go to the exact opposite side now so slippery on this tarp.

I’m just gonna put some tension on it. Pull it now. The front of the tent doesn’t have a single central anchor uh, that’s right across from the back, so I’ll do the back and then I’ll do the two, the ones on each side of the door like to give it a little bit of tension not too much for this one, because the other ones aren’t in on that end yet helps it in well. That is solid ground good enough for today, since we’re not staying in the tent just setting it up as a demo, pull it tight, so um, just a tip if you’re not used to setting up these big tents is that your anchoring will be a lot stronger.

If you put a significant angle on this, like beyond 45 degrees, is what I try and accomplish what that does. Is it pushes the anchor into the ground uh so that doesn’t have this leverage up here? So I’m just gonna run around quickly and put the rest of these anchors in and again, I’m just gonna go across from each side to side that crossbills are here. That’s cool. Have some crossbows yet around here. Okay, next on the agenda is the polls- and this will look a little more convoluted than it actually is, and that’s because I have an electrical box and some cables uh running up my main pole here that I haven’t taken off for the demo, so uh that won’t be on your tent, but it’s on this one, so you’ll have to put up with it.

So these are all tied together. So there’s not really any confusion. That’s the main poll, it’s as easy, as that, so something I should mention quickly about these poles uh, the first time you use them. It’s important to know this uh. This pole is really nice. It’s uh some kind of painter enamel on it, but the pulls for the door frame uh when we first put the tent up. These had a lot of manufacturing oils on them. Still, you couldn’t really see it on there until you looked at your hands and our hands were all black and we didn’t want to get that on the canvas so uh.

We just took a bucket of hot soapy water, some claws and we spent a little bit of time, actually took a while to get it all off. It’s pretty hardy stuff, but uh yeah. You might want to clean these ones really well before you install them in the tent for the first time. The electrical system we have on here is actually for uh. Some lighting we’ve got some led lights that we can turn on and off from the base of the pole and uh we’ve got a fan ceiling fan that we put in just to push some of the hot air from the stove back down into the room.

So these um I’ve been considering actually uh, putting some two-way tape on these and some uh some spacers and actually putting them into these poles permanently because they fall off once in a while when you’re trying to put them into the tent. So we’ll do the central pole first, these other small poles are for the um for the door frame, I’m just going to unzip the door, so we can get in there. Here’s where it’s really nice to have two people, because there’s a bit of weight behind this, but one person can do it.

So the idea is, the top of the pole goes right into the center of the ceiling and then there’s actually a marker and an extra pad on the floor that the bottom goes on, and the other thing I should show you here is: it comes with this sort of handy hook on it for hanging stuff, and you can’t really reach this hook once it’s up there, so we always have a piece of cordage around it and what that allows us to do is just sort of tent flags things up and down to this hook like our lantern or whatever we might have.

Sometimes we dry clothes on it and whatnot, so I’m just gonna take that top end in push it in I’m going to crawl in there and find the center of the ceiling okay. So that’s what the center of the ceiling looks like, so I’m just going to poke that in there and make sure it stays aligned right about to the middle. One thing you want to do before you set the pull down on the floor in the center of the floor is right there, where that pad.

Is you just want to make sure that that rubber piece has stayed on? So you don’t poke into the floor with the end of the pole, and if you don’t have it in the center, you can take a break if you need for a second for the real line where you’re holding onto the hole from so that. As long as that, rubber piece is on there not going to hurt anything, I want to try and lift the weight off it, so I’m not dragging it across the floor.

There done. For that part, just one more check make sure it’s kind of in the center of the ceiling up there. It’s pretty close, think we’re good okay. So now we’re going to put the door frame poles on and it comes with this piece here and what happens with this? Is this piece we always store it on here, so we don’t lose it, but this little cap goes over the outside of the tent at the front where this goes through the hole, so it kind of just blocks rain from coming down into the hole, and it’s pretty straightforward, I like to assemble it in the tent because it’s easier to get in the tent when it’s disassembled just latch it in there.

It’s just a big triangle: get it around this side of the door a little easier for this side of the pole like so it doesn’t matter which side goes on what side it’s symmetrical then there’s this hole right at the top of the door. So I pull that cap off, put this in the hole and then each one of these ends has a dedicated pocket here somewhere, there’s one make sure it seats right in the bottom of the pocket there. So it doesn’t put any stress on it.

There’s two: here’s a close-up of that little cap and it just goes: oh raven again right up there onto that. It’s just a rain cap to keep rain running down this pole and into the interior of the tent. So one thing you really have to remember to do with these tents is before you start putting these lines on and tightening them up make sure everything is zipped up and the reason for that is. If I tension everything up- and this is unzipped, then it’s not going to come together easily and you’re going to put a lot of tension on it.

When you try and zip it up so really important to zip all your zippers up. Okay. So these are the pegs that we used for the perimeter of the floor and now what we’re going to do for all the guidelines around the tent is we’re going to use these heavy duty ones and again, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do opposite sides and ends so uh. It doesn’t really matter too much where I start, but I like to start somewhere sort of the symmetrical.

So I can start on the sides or front and back, but I’m going to do one side and then I’m going to do the opposite side, just to keep the tension on the whole thing as even as possible and keep the pole uh as level as possible pulling the center. Don’t have to worry too much about the tension at this point because I can tension it. Each one of these guide wires has its own tensioner on it. It’s a little cam, I’m just going in enough to show the demo here, but typically you’d want to get these as far into the ground, as you could so you’ll notice on the front one.

It has a much heavier duty rope, and that is because this will have by far the most tension on it. If the wind comes up, especially if it comes the wind comes towards the door of the tent, because it’s flat, so it’s not as aerodynamic. So it’s really important that you find a good place to hammer in your steak. If you’ve got an extra steak or pig, you can always add one here. You want to make sure you get in the ground as far as you can.

Okay, the final step is these anchor points right here and what this does is. It keeps uh basically a rain canopy over the zipper here, and it also helps tension, the walls a little bit better and they go in the same peg as the anchor below them. So it says the last step I do is I just run around the tent and throw those over top of the pegs like so I’ll go around the tent, and then it’s done so you can see. Setting this up is really easy, uh very little to figure out on it.

Everything just kind of goes where it looks like it’s supposed to go and uh didn’t. Take me long, even though there was filming going on- and I was doing it by myself so yeah, I’m gonna show you how to uh fold this up really nicely now uh. I won’t bother showing you how to take it down because it’s exactly the same as putting it up just in the opposite direction, but uh we’ve figured out how to sort of fold it up really nicely so that it fits in the bag.

It came in the duffel bag and there’s actually some spare room by the time. You’re done so once I get this sort of leveled out I’ll show you what we do. I just saw a bird light in that tree right up there and it’s not saying anything, but I bet you it’s a gray j, just gonna grab the other camera and get a picture of it for you guys. Well, it was definitely a gray j, not sure I got a very good picture of it, but uh. If I did I’ll throw it in the video there.

It’s destiny, jj’s, very curious birds. Okay, I’m gonna get mrs catnip to help us, so the tree is doing the filming now, hopefully, that’s all gonna be in frame, oh yeah, so the first thing I like to do is zip the door back up on it. So I’m gonna do that and then the other thing we do usually is we throw these guidelines into the center too? We don’t bother uh tying them up or anything. They came all folded up nicely stowed and whatnot when uh when we got the tent, it was a really nice attention to detail, but it’s not really necessary.

It’s kind of it takes up more time. I’m just going to take this door just toss it into the center roughly and throw all the guidelines in, and I like to pull it back out into it. That’s so slippery on that snow make it center again. So the next thing we’re going to do here is paying attention to where the door is. We always want to remember where the door is so that when we uh set it up again, we can orient it in the right direction without having to swing it all around and we’re just going to take the door side and we’re going to go almost to the middle.

So one of these anchors here is the center, which one is it. Is it this one and this one I think so right this one, and that one does that look right, yeah, that’s right! So I go by the anchors on the very left and right side of the tent and we’re gonna bring in the front of the tent just about to those two anchors, the line drawn between those two side anchors a little further on that one. I think right, there’s the center there so just bringing this in line with those two side anchors not quite to the to it, because we want some room for folding too and then we’ll do the same with the back again.

We just don’t want them quite touching. Just so there’s room to fold them. That’s just a little bit, that’s good there! You can see the I don’t know if you can see it on the camera. There’s a seam going all the way through here between the two side acres, so that’s kind of what we’re aiming for there. Okay yeah! Then the next step is we’re going to fold this in half and that in half same direction it’s a little stiff in the cold.

Usually it just flops right over in the summer, but gotta work with stiff rubber here, it’s good. It really doesn’t have to be super perfect, because there is a lot of room in that duffel bag, really nice of the manufacturer to give us a slightly oversized duffel bag. I like to go just not quite touching so there’s room to fold them over again, okay and then it doesn’t matter which side goes over and one of them goes on top of the other.

Oh yeah slippery huh, it’s very slippery all right again, okay, so the next job is and doesn’t matter which end you go from just uh tightly roll it. So it’s a standard circle, and actually you know what I like to do I like to pick the end: that’s the widest and start there. It’s probably that end hey, so it kind of gets wider as you go so just like. So so we know that uh, this end here is still the door end, so we want to kind of keep track of that on the duffel bag.

What I do is I put the door in uh the door side into the duffel bag, where the zipper ends up when it’s closed, and that way I know when I unzip it. This part is the door and I actually put our accessories in that end too, and it just is a little bit more of a marker that the doors on that end a little bit bigger today, because it’s a cold day. I think it’s got it. So we have all this room on the front here and we’ll just put the accessories in there.

There we go. Oh we got to put the pegs in. That’s it thanks everybody uh. We really appreciate you watching these and uh. If you want to see more, if you really enjoy what you’re seeing on this uh, please support the channel subscribe, hit the bell hit the like button and maybe check out our merch link in the description below. Oh, my feet’s, a number mom [Laughter], oh, oh there you go. Oh it’s not going! It’s still going.

I don’t like it. This way, no should put the whole log in there, but there you go nicely done now. We’ll go nicely work. This is catnip dancing, you’re out of fire. That’s right in the fire dance did I tell you she’s, really shy of the camera yeah. I am oh, my god. You.