Tag Archives: camping

Polish Tarp by KollteX – Review and Abuse Field Test

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Tarp Half Tent

Some time ago I received a tarp for testing. I took my time to do it right as I like to ‘torture’ equipment to see what I can expect from it when shit hits the fan. Don’t get me wrong I didn’t intend to break it deliberately. I just wanted to use it like I normally would and see what fails first.
The tarp is about 3 m long by 3 m wide (10×10 ft) and weighs approximately 800 g or 1.8 lb. So it’s a large, but relatively lightweight, square piece of waterproof cloth.

Tarp with hammock rear viewIt’s said to be waterproof up to 600 mm of water or have a 600 mm hydrostatic head. This seems like a rather poor water resistance compared to many other tarps and tents of which even the cheapest ones easily reach 2000 or even 5000 mm. But this is a separate matter and I’ll get back to it later.

 

KollteX Tarp hammock and cameraThe main job of a tarp is to keep us dry. But this one has at least one more feature borrowed, as far as I know, from the military. It can be used as a stretcher to carry an injured person. It even has special reinforced loop-like holders. The fabric seems quite thin (which is probably inevitable considering its low weight) but when folded in half, it’s actually really strong.

Half Tent KollteX Tier OneI didn’t have enough man power to test it properly but I did manage to stretch it between two trees and use it like a hammock. The first attempt ended up as a failure with me landing on my ass. That was , however, my own fault as I overthought it a bit and attached the para cord incorrectly. It tor the tarp’s edge a bit but it was still usable and I tried again. This time everything went to plan and soon I was dangling few inches above the ground. I only weigh about 80 kg (176 lb) and I’m not sure how well it would work for a heavier person.

So we know the tarp can be used for carrying heavy objects. But that’s an extra feature. What about its main job? Since it wouldn’t rain here, I had to produce an artificial rainfall. And it was a heavy one. I used a garden hose pouring water from close distance for good several minutes. The tarp took it well. Or so it seemed at first. On closer inspection, it turned out that the main heavy duty tape wasn’t sealed at all. After asking about it, I was told by one of the distributors that this was just a prototype and the issue would be dealt with in the future.

Honestly, I don’t think it should be left for later. Something like this should really be taken care of before testing. Especially that it defies the main purpose of every tarp – keeping rain out. Saying ‘we’ll do it later’ just isn’t doing it for me because the devil is in the detail. Unfortunately. So it isn’t so much about when you’re gonna do it but how it’s gonna be done. And at this point, one of the most important parameters of the tarp remains a mystery.

Despite that, I decided to continue my tests and see how the tarp feels when setting it up and so on. It’s huge, soft and light, which makes it easy to work with. Overall, I like the idea. It’d be interesting to see the finished product and how it takes the everyday use and abuse.

What’s interesting is that it already seems to be available at http://tierone.pl/tarp-3×3-wz93-kolltex-p-1483.html and costs roughly $39 or £25.
Maybe only the one I got hasn’t been finished..? Maybe it’s a different model..?

 

Survival Water Filter from Wood – (How) Does it Work?

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Wooden filter full viewI first saw this water filter made from a wooden stick long time ago on somebody’s blog. I’ve since read a lot of comments and opinions about its usefulness. Turns out, this idea comes from a publication in a free-access online scientific journal, which means everyone can download and read it for free. So I decided to read the article and test the filter so you don’t have to do it 🙂

Wooden filter full small close upFirst of all, I must admit I wasn’t able to replicate the experiment with a 100% accuracy as the biggest bottle I could find (5 litres) was not big enough to exert enough pressure for the filter to work efficiently. It did work but way too slow. That’s ok though. My point wasn’t to make it work exactly like in the paper. I simply wanted to illustrate what this might look like when made from simple readily available items. And other than the fact it wasn’t fast enough, it worked pretty well. It filtered water, didn’t leak along the walls (as far as I can tell), didn’t cost much or take long to build and required little effort and attention to keep it going.

Wooden filter top close upLets get to the questions.
– What wood and why?
The authors used white pine but they point out that it doesn’t have to be this particular species. What it does have to be, however, is a coniferous tree. Why? Because conifers have much shorter vessels and thicker xylem layer than deciduous trees, which allows us to use those short sticks effectively and safely. In other words, due to extremely long vessels of broadleaf trees water would simply pass through damaged xylem without being filtered properly.

Wooden filter close up from topConifers are able to filter particles down to 200 nm in diameter, which means their vessels will stop bacteria, protozoans, cysts and eggs of some nasty worms. Unfortunately, they won’t stop viruses.

How fast does it filter water? According to the paper, pressure of 5 psi (35 kPa) should allow several litters of water to pass through the filter every day. Enough for at least one person even in a hot environment. Again, to exert such pressure you will need a bigger container than the one I used here and you’ll have to keep toping it up not allowing for the pressure to drop too dramatically and to slow the filtration down.

So is this a viable survival method? First of all, I don’t think it was supposed to be. The authors say the idea was to address “the need for pathogen-free drinking water in developing countries and resource-limited settings”. Ok, the ‘resource-limited settings’ can be interpreted as a survival situation. And yes, if you stay in one place long enough and if you have the materials required to build such a filter it should serve you well. But if you just wont something that you can shove in your pack and use like a straw straight out of river, you can forget about it. I know because I’ve tried it. So I suppose it all depends on a situation.