WOODEN tents such as I am about to describe, are in use by the contractors who are building the western extensions of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway in Colorado. There are no towns there ahead of the railway, and it is necessary to provide sleeping-quarters, provisions and eating-houses, for the engineers and road-makers. It is therefore needful to have a style of building which can be put up and taken down easily, and, above all, which shall be capable of transportation over the frightful mountain roads. The result, it seems to me, might be useful to bevies of boys, to schoolmasters and pupils, and to families who camp out every summer for some considerable time, and really need to take to the woods a house somewhat better than a cloth tent, where they can live in warmth and comfort, and which shall be a cosey headquarters for storing supplies, and to which they may return. My object now is in these papers to instruct our young home carpenters how during their winter leisure to get one of these comfortable wooden tents in complete readiness for summer transportation. It can be done very cheaply; if you can improve on it, so much the better. For my part, I have never seen or heard of the like anywhere else, though I believe that circus sideshows sometimes have a far more cumbersome arrangement answering the same purpose.
Boys might club together, not only to own such a portable house in common, but to build it—a jolly way of spending Saturdays in some great wagon-house or tool-chamber where there is a big workbench and a good tool-chest.
This movable house consists wholly of wood except the roof, which is canvas, and the floor, which is dirt, unless you choose to plank it. It may be made of any size you see fit, it only being necessary that all the parts are adjusted to the scale decided upon. The dimensions I give, however, are measured upon a plan twelve feet square, because that happened to be the actual size of the one nearest to me. The railway men generally join from two to half a dozen of these together, end to end, making a long and commodious building. A half-dozen congenial families could do the same, insuring endless good times in the forest solitudes. One twelve-foot length is then known as a “section.” If you would rather have an oblong figure, make your ends shorter and reduce the length of your rafters; or, if you don’t like the pretty low pitch of the roof which my measurements imply, lengthen your uprights and rafters to suit your own ideas of the right angle.
Now for my details:
The walls of your tent-house, six feet in height, are to be made of inch-thick matched flooring twelve feet long. They should be No. 1 pine, best quality. Fasten these firmly together, to the width of six feet, by three dressed cleats, six inches wide, one at each end and one in the middle, and do this on both sides. Make three of these platforms, or walls, which will furnish three sides of your house. For the fourth side make a similar platform nine feet in length, filling out the remaining three feet with a door.
This door swings out, and the hinges should be very strong, preferably of the kind used on barn doors, so that it can be lifted off its hanging with ease, and so that the long shaft of the hinge will act as a support to prevent undue sagging. An arrangement must be made to lock this door. It can easily be secured on the inside by a bolt, and outwardly by hasp and padlock.
There remain, now, the peaks or gables at the ends, to be provided for. Many of the railway men get their roof canvas sufficiently large to come down and cover this, but I think a better plan would be to make two triangular platforms of boards, fitted to your peak, cleating them together just like the lower walls. Then place about four flat staples in the outside of your end walls, and let iron hasps bolted to the lower edge of your peak boards drop into them. This would hold the bottom of the peak and the top of the end wall squarely together. In addition to this a couple of bolts should pass through the upright and be secured by nuts, so as easily to be unscrewed. (See fig. 14.) There should be no middle cleat on the inside of the gable. The general character of these walls appears in several of the illustrations, but the cleating is shown in fig. 1. Screws should be used throughout instead of nails. The woodwork remaining to be shaped, consists of the uprights, or centre-poles at each end, the ridgepole, rafters and braces.
The two uprights in my model were 8 feet and 9 inches in height; a greater length would add pitch to the roof. These uprights should be made of clear, firm stuff, 4 inches by 2, and should be thickened at their lower ends by adding pieces of similar size, as shown in figures 2 and 4. This upright stands inside of the wall, and edge-wise. Into its upper inner edge must be set two iron “eyes” having an inner diameter of three quarters of an inch. (See fig. 3). The uppermost of these is placed about two inches from the top of the stick, and the second six inches below. These eyes should pass clear through the timber and be held by nuts on the other side. Six feet from the bottom of the upright, a hooked bolt should be passed through the timber, the hook facing outwardly, and having enough space between it and the wood to allow the wall to come between. Its purpose is to hold the end wall snugly to the upright: therefore it must be loose enough so that it can be turned up while the wall is being put into position, and then turned down to clamp it firmly, as in figure 4.
Having made both uprights alike, you now turn your attention to the ridgepole. This ought to be somewhat heavier than the uprights, two by six scantling being none too strong for the strain which the weight of your canvas and an occasional gale of wind will put upon it. It is twelve feet long, of course, and six inches from each end will have an iron pin 18 inches in length driven through from its upper side, intended to go through the eyes at the top of the uprights. This is shown in fig. 5.
On each side of this ridgepole screw in four stout staples or eyes, one at three inches from each end, and the others at equal distances between; to these the rafters are to be attached. (See figs. 3 and 5.) Similar staples must be placed an inch below the upper inside edge of the side walls to contain the irons at the lower end of the rafters, as in fig. 6; of course, therefore, it is necessary that the staples in the walls should fall exactly opposite those on the ridgepole.
The rafters themselves, eight in number, may be made of the same sized stuff as the uprights, or lighter, if a tough wood like elm or ash is used instead of pine; and each will be 7 feet and 4 inches long unless you want a pretty steep roof, in which case you must lengthen them somewhat. To the underside of the upper end is fastened a strong curved hook, which hangs in the staples on the ridgepole (fig. 5); while to the lower end is fastened a pointed iron three inches long, and set at such an angle that it will stand vertical in the eye on the wall (see fig. 6 next paper) when the rafter is in place.