Repairing an Aluminum Tent Pole
I bought a Hobitat 4 tent at a recent REI used gear sale. This tent truly appeared to be brand new, but had been returned because two aluminum poles had been split at the ends. That probably happened when a new owner had tried to put the tent up the first time. (Indoors, it seemed – there was not a speck of dust on this tent!)
The rainfly had certainly never been used, or even unfolded, all of the components were present, and the tent was spotlessly clean. Even the pole repair sleeve was there, also unused.
I easily repaired the poles myself. Comparing this to the normal price of this tent, this saved me about $175.
This post will run quickly through how I repaired the pole with the smaller crack in the end. The trick here was to make the repair without cutting the shock cord that runs through these several sections of connected aluminum poles.
The broken end of one shock-corded pole section
A piece of brass stock inserted to prevent accidental cutting of cord
Carefully sawing a bit beyond the crack
When I reached the brass rod, I rotated the pole & cut through the other side.
End has been cut off, though not as neat as I’d hoped.
Cutting bad end piece lengthwise with metal shears so it can be removed.
Barbs are removed, the ends evened, and finally smoothed with a Dremel.
The damage on the other pole was larger, and required cutting the shock cord, which I then tied back together with some spare cord I had on hand. I had to cut three inches of the pole for that one, but it still works fine. In retrospect, I could have used the same method illustrated above for this section too.
The completed pole sections are very long, so three inches doesn’t seem to matter, so far as I could tell. The tent is also designed so that you can increase the pole tension by using closer grommets where they attach to the tent, but my shorter poles work fine even in the original positions.
YMMV. Best of luck!
I had an aluminium tent pole section that started to split once and I just wrapped that end with electrical tape and was gentle with it. It outlasted my use of the tent, to my surprise.
August 14th, 2010 at 11:37 pmI imagine that being gentle with it and favoring that repaired split probably helped that repair last for so long. I don’t doubt that electrical or duct tape would work in most cases. If you can make a cannon from duct tape, you should be able to tape up a split pole end. 🙂
There are also repair tubes that many tents come with now, which are just short sections of aluminum with a larger diameter than the main tubes. You slip the repair tube over the split/break and it should hold just fine if not subjected to excessive stress.
Poles are generally easy to repair, and I have quite a lot of extras from an older style Hobitat 4 tent I bought at an REI used gear sale. The rain fly was shredded, and we had to repair two slices in the tent wall, but the whole thing only cost us $25 and we used it for two or three years.
August 15th, 2010 at 10:22 amI have used hose clamps for an inexpensive and surefire repair. My Hobitat 4 has 5 split ends now. Ugh.
August 20th, 2019 at 12:19 pmGood idea, Tim!
August 20th, 2019 at 4:45 pmGreat idea! My tent’s poles both broke in a similar fashion. I used a tubing cutter to remove the split part from the end, then used files to smooth the edges.
August 27th, 2020 at 7:53 pm