Need help on Vintage tent

[firep323]

I have an older 2 man tent. only info I can find on the tent itself is
GOLDEN WEST NYLON TENT PROFESSIONAL PACKERS
I cant find any info about it on the web and it has myself amnd my co workers stumped!!! thought it would be great for my son ANY and ALL INFO would be great !!!
THANX:confused:

[Pickled_Sour]

Re: Need help on Vintage tent

I have an older 2 man tent. only info I can find on the tent itself is
GOLDEN WEST NYLON TENT PROFESSIONAL PACKERS
I cant find any info about it on the web and it has myself amnd my co workers stumped!!! thought it would be great for my son ANY and ALL INFO would be great !!!
THANX:confused:

Were you interested in selling the tent?

[TroyS]

Re: Need help on Vintage tent

Tried doing some research about it, but nothing is coming up, except this old ad I found which dates back to the 70s. I'm guessing that the company may no longer be in operation.

But judging from the picture in the ad, it looks like a walled canvas tent. Perhaps you can try checking out YouTube for some videos on how to set up a canvas walled tent to get an idea how to set it up.

[Mike]

Re: Need help on Vintage tent

We had a Golden West tent back in the mid 1970's. It was nothing special and I got it on sale new for I think it was $10.00. It was pretty big - a four man tent, I think.

There was nothing very special about the design - A-frame with side wall cook's tent design. Single wall, no rain-fly. Orange nylon. Metal YKK zipper screen door and tie-down window flaps.

I bought it as a teen with money earned painting houses, mowing lawns, and waiting tables, but rarely used it because my friends and I used lighter/smaller "wetter" two-man pup tents.

I gave it several coats of water repellent from a gallon can of ancient repellent and a brush.

My Dad, mom, and siblings adopted it and used it for many years as it became the family tent. Despite the single-wall design, it had a reputation for keeping out the rain even in bad storms. I don't think I ever spent a night in it, but my friends did on one trip I was on and it rained for four days straight. The Golden West was the only dry tent in the group. I think the dryness of the tent was due to the many coats of water repellent I put on it rather than any special characteristic of the tent itself. There really wasn't much to the design, fabric, or quality that made it special or superior in any way. I guess that the ripstop nylon with the simple two-pole design made it light-weight for it's size.

Most 1970's nylon tents were not impressive or special. So many things have improved since then without any significant addition to cost. Many of the old "new technology" nylon tents were really slightly modified versions of traditional canvas pup tents and required lots of ground stakes. Old-school metal zippers abounded which were unreliable and prone to failure. The overall designs were limp and flimsy and shook like wind-socks in storms.

Once in awhile, you stumble upon these old nylon tents at garage sales, but the faded and brittle nylon is rarely worth the pocket change it cost to buy them. If there is one advantage to the old-school nylon tents, it is size and weight. The old pup tent designs had two rigid aluminum poles for suspension rather than the multiple fiberglass poles of today. Thus, they were a lot lighter. They were meant for surviving a night of rain and really were not for hanging around in like today's tents. The expectation of tents in those days when canvas still abounded was that rain meant getting at least a little wet even in the best of tents, so tents were more simple, thus lighter, and more pack friendly.

The advertisement posted by Troys is telling of the tents of the day: TWO man tent 4.5' wide and 3' high. That would MAYBE be a one-man tent today. 7' long which meant that a six foot tall man would be bumping either the foot or the head of the tent or both in a single wall tent, so if it rained, you better curl up into a fetal position or your sleeping bag would soon become a sponge. The cost of $35.00 meant twenty hours of work to buy this flimsy tent at a time when minimum wage was $1.76/hour. In today's money that would be about $160 for that tiny wet tent. The big advantage was weight and size. A two lb tent is unique in today's world.