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 A system used every day by thousands of temporary vendors in every flea
market across America have long since established what will break down and set
back up in very little time and by typically just one person. Party Tents.
Sometimes called canopies or even conduit tents because they are assembled
utilizing the very lightweight, surprisingly strong electrical conduit. Besides
being so easy to work with, the pipe is very inexpensive. Since so many vendors
use these "do it yourself" tents, the instant connectors are readily
available and are fitted with thumb screws making their use easy and incredibly
fast. Once in place, the wall material, plastic tarp, can be attached with
little looped bungee cords in the same time frame. Really fast!
It took a few months of research before I decided on using this system for
making walls inside my garage. The two most used sizes of tent frames at swap
meets are 3/4" and 1" conduit tubing. After inspecting many of the
structures which many are left up year around here in Southern California where
I live, I noticed that the tents made out of the 3/4" pipe were commonly
bent and bowed from the stretched tarp as well as from bodies contacting the
down posts. But the tents made from 1" heavy gauge pipe seemed to hold up
under pretty extreme situations and were almost never damaged. After getting a
lot of answers from the local flea market tent vendor, I decided to give it a
try.
I purchased some various fittings to the 1" conduit I would be using
and measured how much distance they would take up and deducted that amount out
of each dimension so I could determine what lengths I would need so I could cut
all my conduit at one time in advance to assembling my haunt.
 Each fitting was drafted to scale on the computer screen using Visual Cadd
so I would have very accurate dimensions to cut my conduit. Once the fittings
were created I had to layout the surrounding limitations to see what size to set
up. Visual Cadd offers many layers, so I started with the garage walls and door
opening on the 1st layer in black. On the second, I chose where to place my tent
walls (more prominently visible in black). On the third layer I drew in the
placement of all my overhead lights, attic door and garage door motor in green
(not shown) to make sure that there would be nothing directly overhead of any
spot I would need clear ceiling space. Then finally the scenes of the haunt were
added in red to establish that the proposed layout would house everything I
wanted to include. In the photo above you can see exactly the clearances that
were needed, so you could do your layout for your garage just using a
calculator. and skip the exhaustive CADD portion of this preliminary
work. The above photo updated from 2002 haunt shows that I allowed
12" clearance between my tent walls and the walls of the garage with the
rear wall 16" to accommodate the fog chiller. This clearance is imperative,
as you WILL need to get around the perimeter of your wall structure to complete
and run your haunt. 12" is minimum for an adult under 200 lbs to pass by.
My goal in design was to not only accommodate my desires of a tight and
efficient maze, but to achieve it with the least amount of cuts in the pipe and
the least amount of differing lengths. That makes it easier to set up all the
pieces next year, and less work to mark and cut them initially.
Here you see the tent walls with each scene set up in each room. It is
important to note that I determined right from the start that I would be using
7' wide tarp 100% for my wall system. You can order your tarps in many different
sizes, but for me, 7' was the magic number, as I would be setting up my walls at
80" high. Since the tarps are measured at their rough dimensions, one that
has been fitted with the brass grommets for attachment has shrunk to an actual
78" finished width, since 3" of the material is folded over to
reinforce the grommet area. And since I would have 78" clearance between my
upper and lower horizontal (rails) pipes, the short bungee cords would lash the
walls fairly tightly. I learned later that 82" would have been a better
height for taught walls using the 7' tarp, but 80 isn't real loose. The reason I
have some of my uprights cut to 79" and the others 77" is because the
fittings I am using for the various uprights differ slightly between each other.
Both cuts will get me to the desired 80" height using both types of
fittings. In 2002 I was forced to use the shorter 77" lengths for my
uprights where I used a 2 way fitting and just not slide the pipe all the way in
to achieve the 80" because I was using the original pipes from last year's
maze which had less rooms and I needed to expand it to what you see here. There
is little need to worry about the length of each tarp you use since you will be
able to overlap each length as much or little as you want to get each section
tight. I would recommend getting almost exclusively 15' lengths so they aren't
really heavy or difficult to work with, but give you versatility.
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