Martin Zemtis, Devon Brown, and SlingFin - Mountaineering Tent Testing and Design

SlingFin's HardShell has just won a prestigious Gold Award at the 2013 Outdoor Fredrickshafen Show.

The Show's website comments on the Gold Award winners: This year, the experts judged a total of 316 entries from 27 countries. 52 products were selected as winners of the OutDoor INDUSTRY AWARD 2013. The following eleven entries were honored with a GOLD award for outstanding achievement in terms of design and innovation.

Concurrently, a rave review in OutdoorGearLab stated:

"The SlingFin HardShell tent is the equivalent of Air Force One for mountain climbers and polar explorers. Its innovative design and premium materials make the tent reasonably lightweight (12 lb. 4 oz. with carbon poles), easy to setup, and castle strong. It's like a portable luxury suite for the world's most heinous conditions. 

 

"SlingFin more or less identified the drawbacks to existing top-tier dome tents and addressed them all. Down to the last little plastic clip. We suspect that the HardShell is the best 3-4 person four-season dome tent on the planet. 

I thought this might be a great time to edit out some video on SlingFin tents that we shot for a Kickstarter campaign (thanks, Herb, Yvette, & Peter). While focusing on a pack project, we took time to discuss tent design in general and the recent SlingFin tents in particular. Here's the results. Good info; great footage; hack editing but here is:

Martin on Tent Design Principles (see also Sierra Designs' Mt Washington PR Video)
Martin's commentary on Mt Washington
Martin & Devo on the Webtruss
Martin & Devo on details of HardShell & OneUp

See also this story on Sierra Designs' Mt. Washington tent test trips.  

More on the HardShell and OneUp here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SlingFin1/videos