Back in 2020, we purchased a Panther Primitives Saxon wedge tent. Made from Excel canvas in yellow and black, it’s heavy and sturdy and the perfect tent for camping as a small family. But for shipping reasons I purchased just the canvas and decided to build the poles myself. The first iteration of this tent’s poles were red oak, and simply the standard two uprights and a ridge pole that most Saxon-style wedges and getelds use.
These poles did the trick for a while, but we very quickly found that there’s a lot of limitations to this setup. For one, it’s basically impossible to set up solo. At least one person is needed to hold the poles up while someone runs around the outside staking everything down. For another, we have two dogs, a tiny purebred GSD and a ginormous GSD/Great Dane mix with tons of other stuff in his muttiness, and both of those dumbasses simply love to go in the tent through one door and exit the other, looping their leashes around the upright poles and threatening some serious destruction. So I went to the drawing board and did some thinking, and came up with a ludicrous plan for a new set of poles. I took inspiration from the Oseberg ship tent, but modified the vertical poles to have precise angles cut in since my canvas doesn’t have space for the traditional Oseberg animal heads to stick out of the top.
First up: a new, lighter weight ridge pole with knotwork carving and holes for hanging things like lights and fans.
With the ridge completed, I also through together the two ground poles that run between the base poles. These are just some pine 2x2s with the ends rounded off like the ridge poles.
After that I got to work on the uprights. Each end gets an entire triangle of poles. The fun part was doing the trig to get all my angles correct so everything could be trimmed to sit flush under the fabric. These are poplar boards, specifically 5/4x4s.
I waited to cut the base boards until I had the geometry of the tops of the angled boards locked in so I could be lazy about measuring.
At this point I was able to throw the canvas over top and see if my plan was gonna work, and I was so thrilled to see the top look exactly how I’d envisioned it. So clean and tight! I feel like I really did something genius here, especially with the peg matched to the top of the 2×4.
From there I just needed to trim the base boards, sand and stain everything, and do some fine tuning. The result is a tent I can set up and take down completely solo, that is exceptionally sturdy in the nightmarish winds of South Dakota and waterproof to the summer storms of Minnesota and Iowa, and that my dogs can’t knock over with their stupidity.
The following series of photos is one our friend Gaia dubbed “Nap, Interrupted” and it makes me laugh every time so I included it.
With this new pole setup, I can also use two to three extra poles and some ropes open it up into a dayshade! Soon this will be updated with a much needed improvement that reduces the amount of ropes. This makes it especially great for our annual shire fencing tournament, which frequently is visited by Northshield royalty.
Finally, here’s some photos of our tent at a distance at events. I just really love this tent a lot and how much color it adds to an event site. It gives me a lot of joy!
