I have one of these tents. I'm about to give it some intensive bike-ported use, and I'd like to shorten the end poles. Has anyone done this?
The rigid parts of the tent consist of one main central pole, which folds, and two carbon rods, one at either end, which don't. This is a problem, as they're a bit too long. I'd like to carry the tent in a frame bag (
this sort of thing) but the rods are 56cm and I've got about 52cm to play with inside the frame.
In the past I've carried the tent lashed to the top of the rack, like in the picture below. I'd prefer to carry it under the top tube though, for several reasons. Removing the end rods in transit isn't really an option: I've tried that before and it makes the tent a complete pain to pitch; I'd leave it strapped to the rack rather than remove them again.
The options I can think of are:
1) Shorten the poles. Has anyone tried this? I'm inclined to think it would spoil the cut of the tent, and am loath to try.
2) Saw the poles in half and reattach using some sort of sheath, so I can shorten them for transit and then reconnect them for pitching
3) Similar to (2), buy some normal telescoping tent poles and cut them to size. I'd only need a single join in each pole, so I could manufacture two end poles that had an elastic join in them, and halve them for transit.
4) Get some shorter dummy poles so I can remove the long ones but use the dummies to keep the tent in order during transit. I doubt this will work tbh.
Does anyone have any experience of doing any of these things? I'm tending towards (3) but would like to hear from anyone who's done it before.