bennelson wrote: I have an old green canvas boyscout tent. It is pretty big, about 8ft deep almost 10 ft wide, almost 6 ft tall at peak and has 2.5 ft side walls. . . What about building a foldout trailer frame that would fit this tent? There would be pretty much no sewing involved, because the tent is already done. Just build some sort of folding frame that would support the canvas without any ropes or stakes etc.
What you're talking about doing is EASY!
I've got a 6-1/2' wide X 16-1/2' long flat bed trailer that I use for hauling airplanes. It has a plywood bed. So, like you, I thought, what about pitching a tent on this nice, dry, trailer bed?
Only trouble is, my tent isn't a pop-up. Like your tent, it has stakes and ropes and other implements of destruction (which usually get you in the dark). A pop-up dome tent would work much easier and would need a smaller base to put it on (no ropes outside the tent).
The stakes, of course, go into holes in the ground. So why wouldn't they go into hole I bored through the plywood trailer bed?
Answer is, they do! So I laid the bottom of the tent on the trailer, then bored holes for the stakes. The tent didn't want to stand up, but the usual poles fixed that. To make it stable there are the usual ropes in tension, held by stakes. So I made holes for those stakes, too.
The procedure for setting the tent up now goes like this. Take the aircraft off the trailer. Take tent out of bag. Drop stakes through holes at edges of tent and through holes in trailer. Put the poles into the tent. Pull the set-up ropes tight, put a tent stake through the end, and drop the sharp end of the stake through the hole in the trailer bed. Add the rain fly to the tent.
FYI, I use a 2-man mountain tent that's about 7' long, 3' wide, and 3' high at the peak. The set-up ropes add about 2-1/2' more to the length and about 1' more to the width. This is a tiny, tiny tent. But you can see why a 4' x 8' teardrop would seem spacious and luxurious after using this tent for 18 years!
For build pix of Crocodile Tear, completed 10/26/06 -- Look at my album or new website <www.crocodiletear.com> (website has more info)