- This is the Maximus 3 Hiking Tent
from Explore Planet Earth,
a really affordable and sturdy 3-person hiking tent,
and I'm gonna show you how to set it up and pack it away.
Let's get rolling.
(upbeat music)
G'day folks, Ben from Snowys here today
at the Brownhill Creek Tourist Park
with the Explore Planet Earth Maximus 3 Hiking Tent.
This is an awesome hiking tent
for those that are on a budget.
It won't break the bank,
yet it's still sturdy and durable, easy to pitch,
and it's gonna give you good protection in most weather.
I'm gonna show you how to set it up and pack it away today.
This is how it comes when you buy it.
It weighs about 3.4, just over 3.4 kilos.
By the time you strip some of the bags and things out,
you might be able to take about 150,
possibly up to 200, grammes off of that
if you're not gonna use all the pegs as well.
It measures about 55 cm in length,
and around about 17 cm, maybe up to 20 cm, in diameter
depending on how tightly you roll it up.
I'll start with what comes inside the bag.
So inside the bag, which has got
these compression straps on it to keep it secure,
you've got some pitching instructions.
These are the poles that you need,
they're a 9 1/2-mm alloy pole.
You get these little tri-pegs to set it up with,
nice and light, good balance of weight and durability.
Some extra guy ropes in there as well.
This is the inner fly and the fly rolled up together,
and this is another spot
where you can probably shave weight if you want to,
this little gear loft that goes up in top of the tent.
It's an integrated lighting system,
so you can put some batteries in here,
or just unplug it and use a USB power bank.
There's little lights that run around the edge of this,
we'll try and show you that later if we can,
just for a bit of light inside.
But you can leave that at home
and probably save yourself maybe another 100 grammes.
The first thing we're gonna do is separate the inner here,
lay it out, and I'm gonna put the frame in place.
Actually, I'll put some pegs in place first
because the wind's starting to pick up.
The tent's pretty much symmetrical,
so the only real consideration I've got with orientation
is where I want the doors, which side I want the doors.
There's one on each side,
and they run in opposite directions,
so this zip runs this way,
the door on the other side, the zip runs the other way.
So I'm gonna have my doors on that side and this side
so the ends of the tent are facing that way.
That's the only consideration with orientation.
So now I've got it pegged down,
the wind's not gonna take it away,
I'm gonna grab the poles and assemble them,
it's all one piece, then we can clip them in place.
And when you're inserting all these pole sections,
make sure you do it gently,
don't just flip them into place,
you can damage the alloy in that instance.
And when you seat them in place,
make sure that this ferrule goes right inside each pole,
so there's no gap in between.
If we let it go partway like this,
there's a chance of causing damage to the frame.
So I've now got this all in place here,
lying on top of the tent.
You can see it's the same length at both ends.
We've got the end poles here,
that's gonna create a structure here,
cross pole in the middle to lift the sides up.
Now, these ends of each of these poles
go in the eyelets on each corner.
So we put them in place,
and we gently bend the frame up and into shape as we go.
This is probably the most awkward of the tent,
being a three-person it's just a little bit wide
to reach on the other side.
But we need to pull these tabs up from above the doors
and put this cross pole in place.
Now, I need to do the same thing on the other side
without this falling out.
Now that will just sort of hang there,
you wanna carefully let that hang,
I can jump around to the other side,
and quickly pivot it up before it falls out,
and then do the same over here.
So that's the frame in place.
We still need to go around with all of these clips here
and attach them up to the frame.
Now, as we do this, try and do it evenly,
so what you do on this side,
do the same on the other side,
and what we're reducing the instance of there
is the frame bending right out one way.
If we were to clip everything on that side,
it would bow right out and create excess force
on one end of the tent.
If we do it one side at a time,
we're keeping things nice and even
and we're not putting excess strain
on any point of the frame.
We do this all the way to the base of the tent.
So we're now ready to put the fly on the tent.
We've just gotta work out the orientation.
Once again, it does have these vents
that feature at each end of the tent,
so I know that's one end,
and we've got another vent at this end of the tent.
There we go, so now I've got each end there.
The zippers are on the side,
so I'll throw this over this way.
You need to come in up underneath here
at the top of the zip, where the side zip is here.
We've got another eyelet that goes
over the top of the cross pole here as well.
We've gotta do that on both sides.
Now, as we go to the other side,
just keep a bit of tension on this
so that it doesn't fall out as we walk around.
Before we go any further, we'll just fold the fly back.
We've got these tabs under here
to put around the frame to hold it in place,
and that feature's on
both sides here.
So as we go down the tent,
we work our way towards the base
and put all of these in place.
There's a couple more down this low as well.
Once we get to the base of the corners of the tent,
we just wanna loosen this strap right out,
it can be tight like this, so make sure it's nice and loose.
And this eyelet then slides in up
underneath the pole here to secure it in place.
We can then just firm that up a little bit.
And we do that on all four corners.
So the fly's on and secure,
there's just a few more peg points to consider.
You don't have to use them all,
but there is a guy rope attachment at each end here
that you can use the guy ropes that came with your tent
to make it even more secure, more sturdy,
I would recommend using those.
There's another peg point at the base here,
just to hold the fly out from the inner tent there.
And probably the ones that you absolutely do need to use,
and potentially you could set this up with just two pegs,
but just pegging each vestibule out here.
So if you wanted to trim back weight as much as you could
and just take a peg for this vestibule and that vestibule,
you certainly could, but you need to be aware
that the tent's not gonna be quite as sturdy doing that.
For today, these are the only two I'm gonna put in place,
and then we'll show you that lighting system.
Now, there are a couple of vents
at each end of the tent here
that you can leave sealed up like this for full protection,
or open it up, you can see there's no mesh in there,
it's just access straight inside the tent,
use this kickstand and create a bit of a vented space there
for ventilation through the tent,
it helps the condensation at night.
Now, these doors you can set up
in a couple of different ways as well.
There's a storm flap over the zip running down here,
if we unzip this, we can roll up one or both sides
to keep them up and out of the way.
So if I do this up through this tab here now,
it's gonna give us a little bit of protected storaging
underneath the awning here,
while keeping that up and out of the way.
Alternatively, we can also roll this side up,
and there's another tab on this side
so we can create a fully open awning
on this side of the tent.
And that then gives us access to the inside
where there's just a single door going in the tent.
Now, I wanna jump in there now
and show you this lighting system and how this works.
So I'll just undo this and we'll have a look inside.
We'll spread our little gear loft
or lighting system out here now.
Now, the lights feature in the strip around the edge here.
It also doubles as a little storage gear loft.
The battery pack's integrated here,
this takes four double-A batteries,
and it tucks in its own little pocket
in the gear loft here for storage.
It does attach with a USB here though,
so I'm actually going to detach that
because I've got a power pack here that I'm gonna use
to show you how the lighting works.
But first we need to attach it up into the roof here.
Now, these have got plastic loops on the ends here
that marry up to the plastic clips in the roof here.
There's four of them.
It's longer in one direction, so one here,
one above where I am,
and one above the door that we just came in.
That's now secured in place,
so we can store any valuables up here, hand torches
or things that we need to get to during the night.
And I'll now plug in our power pack, power that up,
plug this in, and there's a little switch on here,
they've come on straight away,
there's a little switch on here,
if I tuck this in this pocket there,
I can press this switch and turn these on and off.
They've just got one setting, an on and off setting,
but you can see the lights that run
right around the side here that aren't very bright now,
but in the dark and night it's gonna create
just a little bit of ambient light inside the tent,
and you're always gonna be able to find your light switch
because it's in the same spot all the time.
That is how you set up the Maximus 3 Hiking Tent
from Explore Planet Earth.
It was pretty easy by myself, it's nice and sturdy,
you could get away with just using two pegs,
I'd probably recommend a few more, at least two pegs
and the two guy ropes at the end for stability.
Pack up is really easy too.
First thing I've done is just take my lighting system out,
I'll pack that separately,
and I'm just gonna roll these doors up too,
it's gonna make it easier to roll the fabric up neatly
if there aren't big sausages of fabric like this in there.
And then I'll get the fly off
and fold that up ready to roll up.
I'm just gonna do the doors up,
make it easier to roll up when it's flattened down.
Now, we can take the frame out now.
As we did when we set it up, what we do on one side
we're gonna do equally on the other side
so that there's no excess force on the frame.
So I'll undo these lower clips first on this side,
and then repeat at the other end.
So from here we can take this centre pole out,
we just take the loop out of that
and you'll find the other end
will probably just fall out as it comes loose,
and then we release it from each corner.
And just be careful as you release these,
because it is under tension.
That'll allow the frame to come out
if you can flick the other side out and lay it down flat.
So now I've left the pegs in till last
so I can pull all these out, fold the inner up,
and put the fly on top, roll it all up together,
back in the bag.
That is how to set up and pack away
the Explore Planet Earth Maximus 3 Hiking Tent.
That was pretty easy all by myself,
I reckon these are a great value 3-person hiking tent
for adventurers on a budget,
and you can grab them online at snowys.com.au
at our lowest prices every day.
If you've got any questions though,
let us know down in the comments below.
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