Integral Design Sil Shelter part 2

The bug inner has a pole cup which allows it to be supported by a walking pole (like the outer). The temptation here is to place the pole in the cup for the inner and then place the inner cup into the outer cup. This is not a good idea as it limits the height the pole and provides no gap between the inner and outer at the top of the shelter. To overcome this I added a short length of string to the tie out point on the top of the bug inner’s pole cap and them simple tied this off to the pole which is placed in the outer cup.

This shows the normal peg out of the closed doors.

Doors, I had read on the net that someone had fitted a zip to the doors rather than just overlapping them, of course after much searching I could not find it again although I did find a reference which mentioned adding Velcro to the doorway. I pegged the two doors out straight and found the cut / design would not allow me to have the doors position as if zipped and not have way too much loose material as can be seen in the photo. So I abandoned the zipper idea and had a play with alternate methods of keeping the doors closed.

Here both doors are pegged out in line with the ridge. This results in the lower edge of the door being loose, and whilst there is peg loops on this lower edge they will not take up the slack.

The overlapping door is a great way to keep it simple and reduce weight, but it does make shutting the door from the inside a little hard. Of course there will be lots of times when you would want the door open at night. However with the bug inner’s front being right up against the opening and if there is a likely hood of rain the door may need to be shut. As I mention earlier the design of the door pieces does not readily allow for a zip to be fitted so after a bit of play I came up with a simple method to close the door from the comfort of the inner. By using a spare rope with line-lok and two pegs I was able to achieve a simple pulley system to pull the door closed and lock it there. This idea will clearly need a few field tests to judge if the stepping over the loose open door is practical.

I have used a spare guy line to achieve this pulley. In normal use the peg would go at the red X. But here the pegged is “fixed” to the line-lok which means the line-lok is always in the same place.


This photo gives a full view of the pulley arrangement. The red circles show the placement of the two pegs. The guy line runs around the front peg (which is hard to see in the grass) and the line-lok is “attached” to the rear peg.