XIV.—HOW TO BUILD A PORTABLE WOODEN TENT.
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.
Fig. 14.