- This is the Coleman lighted instant up
Northstar four person darkroom tent.
A quick pitch tent that has an integrated lighting system
and a darkroom coating on the fly that makes it
easier to sleep in in the mornings.
I'm gonna show you hot to set it up,
pack it away, let's get started.
(jaunty music)
Hi folks, Ben from snowys here today at the
Brownhill Creek Tourist Park down in
Adelaide's leafy eastern suburbs.
Nice little stop-over to park your caravan
or set up your tent if you're passing through
the area or just want a weekend getaway.
It's right near the Adelaide hills,
and only 15 minutes from the city.
Got some Coleman products here today.
This is the Coleman lighted instant up
Northstar four person darkroom tent,
it's a long name.
It's got the traditional, or the instant up frame
that we've always known.
It's got a darkroom coating on the fabric
that keeps the light out of the tent
so it's easier to sleep in when the sun's up,
or easier to sleep in in the mornings.
It also has an extending vestibule out the front.
I'm gonna show you how to set it up, and pack it away today.
This is how it comes, weighs, Coleman say about 15 kilos,
but I weigh this one in at just under 16.
About 114 cm in length, by 25 cm, by 25 cm.
I'll start by showing you what comes in the bag.
So, everything in the bag is all
secured with a couple of ties here.
You get a bag of pegs and all the poles that you need,
there's a couple of awning poles in there as well.
This little gear loft that goes inside the tent for storage.
This is a little doormat that can be
pegged out at the doorway.
You get the battery pack, which is part of
the lighting system, this takes four D cell batteries
but you can also use a USB battery pack
to power the lights in here.
This is the fly sheet, and this bit
here is the main portion of the tent which has got
the frame and the inner tent all in as one.
First thing I need to do is spread this out
and put the pegs in place.
Now, if we stand this up so that the hub is
pointing upwards towards the sky,
that's gonna form the peak of the tent.
And, just unroll the sides and let the legs
fall down to the side, we just need to
work out where the door is
so that we can face our tent the right way.
Now, there's only one door, which I can see is on this side
and I want the tent to face that way.
So, I'm just gonna spin it around
and then I'll pull the four corners out
and put the pegs in place.
It's always good to put the pegs in as soon as you can,
and leave them in for as long as you can at the end
in case the wind kicks up, because it's the wind
that can damage the tent.
Just on the pegs that come with your
instant up tent, they're very lightweight pegs.
You would benefit from upgrading these
to a heavier-duty peg if you're using it
on really hard ground, or if you're using
it on soft ground even, some sand pegs.
So, for now just step inside the door here,
unzip the door if it's not already open.
And, just stand this centre hub up,
and what we wanna do is grab each of these legs.
Find this knuckle, and invert them all back the other way.
Once you do this on all four poles,
you'll see the tent starts to take shape.
Once the knuckles are inverted, we go to each leg
an we extend it to it's full height.
We'll know it's extended to the full height
when a silver pin appears, in this little hole here,
locking it in place.
So, that's the inner tent up.
Really easy, it's as quick and simple as that.
Now we've gotta grab the fly, throw that over the top.
So, you've just gotta orient the fly the right direction.
To know which way, or which side
of the fly the front of it is,
if we have a look for these plastic knuckles.
There'll be two of those on the fly,
if we can just find the other one.
Now, these actually feature in the front,
they form part of what will be the pole structure
for the vestibule at the front of the tent here.
So, I know that this section here
is the front doorway.
So I've got the fly sheet roughly in place,
before we put any pegs in place,
we just need to secure the flysheet to the frame.
So, if we come up underneath here, on each corner.
So, we've got some Velcro tabs,
now these go around the frame here.
The top one goes between the knuckle and the
first C-clip on the inner tent there.
And then, if we follow the seam down,
towards the bottom there's a second one.
That goes around the pole just above the
little locking button on the upright pole there.
And then, at the very bottom, there is a clip that,
on these front ones goes over this metal loop here.
And, on the back ones there's a little plastic
D-loop that that goes around.
We do that on all four poles.
So then, before we put the vestibule
up at the front, we're just gonnna grab a handful of pegs.
We've got three pegs on each side,
to peg out here, for this little
sort of cone-shaped thing here,
which forms part of the circle ventilation system
to allow ventilation up under here
that marries up with this vent here.
Don't peg these too tightly, just firmly.
They're not actually meant to take strain,
they're just meant to sit in place.
Then, there's one extra peg that goes
in the middle of the fly, at the rear of tent.
Now, these are all the poles that come
separately with your instant up tent.
The two with the spigots on the top are for the awning,
to set it up at the front of the tent.
We don't need them just yet.
For the vestibule, we need a combination
of these three poles.
Now, the steel ones are uprights,
for the side, they go in the pin
at the bottom of the tent here.
And then go in the plastic knuckle here,
now there's two sides to this knuckle.
One that just has a plain hole,
the other one has got ribs in it.
And, the larger hole is for the steel end,
the one with the ribs in it seats this fibreglass pole here,
just slightly narrower dimension.
This pole gets seated in the sleeve that runs
across the top of the vestibule here.
And then, each end goes in to this plastic knuckle.
Once we've got the poles in place,
there's a plastic C-clip on each side
that we need to put around the pole there.
And then, we grab two pegs at the front here,
to peg this out and hold it all in place.
And, that's pretty much set up in full.
The only thing I haven't done today is set up
these guy ropes, there's three on each side.
One here, one here, and one on the back corner.
Same on the opposite side.
Should always use the guy ropes,
peg 'em out as far away from the tent
as you can for stability.
They're gonna give the tent much more
structure and stability in windy weather.
We can go one step further with this set up though,
and set up this door as an awning
out the front here, and it's got
little brass eyelets in the
bottom corners here that
can be used for the spigots,
for the top of these tents here.
You get a couple of extra guy ropes with your kit as well,
so you can set this up as a shaded entry
to your instant up tent.
The last few things we haven't talked about
for the set up here, is firstly the battery pack.
You plug that in inside with your batteries in there,
or just your USB rechargeable battery pack.
The little gear loft here, this clips inside.
There's plastic clips on the corners here,
and they clip into little loops in the ceiling.
So, it creates a little high-level sort of storage loft
for you to keep gear up and out the way.
And then, you've got your doormat here that,
it's got little peg loops in it,
so you can just peg that out at
the doorway at the front of the tent.
And lastly, your ventilation options,
and that's these windows here.
Now, there's three of these windows,
the one that features on this side is
the same as on the other side,
the same at the rear of the tent.
You can set these up in one of three ways.
Firstly, zip closed, as you can see here.
Secondly, if you unzip each side like this,
you can use the guy ropes that are attached
and peg this out as a little weather-protected
awning over the top of your window.
Alternatively, if the weather's really nice
and you wanna keep the tent nice and cool,
roll it up and secure it with these tabs
at the top here, to allow ventilation throughout the tent.
If you did that on all three sides,
plus the door at the front of the tent,
you've got plenty of ventilation throughout.
That's how you set up the Coleman lighted instant up
Northstar four person darkroom tent.
Now, that was pretty easy by myself,
didn't take long at all.
Pack up is pretty much just as easy.
First thing I'm gonna do is take down
the awning and the vestibule at the front.
And then, we'll get the fly off.
So, I've taken down the awning
and I've zipped up the door.
We'll now remove the frame from
the vestibule here, so,
undo the C-clip, remove the pole
from the pin at the base here.
And then, take this pole out of the knuckle,
do the same with the steel pole on the other side,
and then slide the pole out the top.
So, now we've just gotta go round and
pull all the pegs out from the fly.
Don't forget to unclip the little
clip at the base here.
And, go up underneath here,
and under our Velcro tabs there's two
of those on each pole.
I'll just pull the fly off and fold this up now,
and then we can collapse the inner tent.
But, before we collapse the inner tent down,
make sure you've got a door or a window open,
to allow the air to escape as the tent collapses down.
And, first thing we wanna do, after that,
is go round to each of these silver buttons
on each pole and lower the tent down.
Once we've lowered all four poles down,
we need to invert these knuckles.
Now, I will mention, I've left all four pegs
in the corners for now, it's calm here today.
But, if it is windy weather or if the wind picks up,
that's the fastest way to damage your tent.
If you leave the pegs in place,
you're reducing the instance of damage.
So, now we go to each of these,
and we invert the knuckles backwards
so the pole collapses down to the floor.
And then, we can take the pegs out.
So, next step is to grab each of these corners
and fold them up towards the centre of the tent,
gathering it all together, try and keep the fabric neat,
as neat as you can, as you go.
Hardest bit is holding all these together at the top here.
Once we've got them all up together,
just take a second to try and spread
the fabric out a little bit, make sure it's not
caught up on any poles on the inside.
And then, lay the frame down on it's side.
Now, once we've got it on it's side,
we've just gotta take a little bit
more time to stretch this fabric,
or to lay this fabric out flat.
What we're trying to do is achieve
a bit of a diamond.
If you spend a bit of extra time doing this now,
it's gonna make rolling the tent up so much easier.
Once we've got this diamond shape,
fold the bottom up, as far as it will go.
This is the base of the frame here.
Grab one side and fold it right over the top
of the whole frame, and from there,
you can roll it up, grab your ties,
and put it back in the bag.
Now, to get everything back in the bag,
I do prefer to put the flysheet in first.
I find it reduces the instance of the flysheet
getting caught in the zip, as you try and do it up.
So, we'll put that in the base,
put the tent on top.
Now, one end of this bag is padded, I like to put the
hub or the pole-end of the bag up there
so that it's padded and isn't rubbing
against anything in transport.
Once we've got that in there,
we put the poles, the pegs, and everything else
in around the edges and zip it up.
Now, that went back in the bag easily.
The bag's actually sized to fit the tent
without too much of a struggle.
That is how you set up and pack away
the Coleman lighted instant up
Northstar darkroom four person tent.
I did that easily, by myself,
it would be even easier if you had a second set of hands.
You can grab these online at snowys.com.au,
our lowest prices everyday.
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like this one down here.
(jaunty music)