Longterm review
Wechsel
Venture
2
tent
My 2022 replacement for the rejected Exped Orion 2 tent
Timespan : early 2022 and NOT ongoing anymore by the end of 2023
Early 2022 I dumped the
Exped Orion2 UL 🖱️
since it had become completely useless.
I then ordered the Wechsel Venture 2 tent and this is my LongTerm experience-report.
For the time being :
Update 1 end of 2022 season
The Wechsel Venture 2 tent is oké in daily life .
But it could do with some extra attention .
It seems the sizing is not fully correct since the flysheet is always hanging a little bit sloppy.
The straps to tie up the innerdoors are to my opinion not positioned at the best possible location.
They should be somewhat more to the higher, wider part of the innerdoor.
As they are now the mainpart of the innerdoor hangs down to far outside of the strap
so the door is still not open.
The (one) strap at the top of the flysheet ment to tie up the outerdoor(s)
is positioned rather far away from the innerdoor.
It means you have to reach out very far to get it loose when you are in the tent.
Problem is you always forget to do that before, which would be unhandy anyway
since then there 21would be two doors hindering you to get inside.
Another problem is that this type if strap is quite troublesome to get loose anyway.
The vestibules are really spacious and therefor handy.
This is a socalled freestanding tent so it needs no lines nor pegs to stand.
That to my opinion is mandatory for real travellers.
You can put it everywhere you want since you don't need regular soil for pegs.
Besides that it is very easy to move the tent somewhere else if you (the next morning)
find out it is in the full morningsun very early ...
The storagebag has already ripped and in fact has become useless.
I store the tent in a drybag anyway so now I do that without the original bag.
The flysheet was sewn badly at one location and it actually was triple-sewed.
Unfortunately I noticed that to late to be able to wait for a replacement.
I took the guess because it looked quite bad and I managed to fix that.
I cut the flysheet loose from that sew and repaired the hole with some special tape.
The pictures show a groundsheet which is not included with the tent and this one is not an original one.
This is the third tent I use it with and it functions well.
Being non-original is not the reason the flysheet looks "flappy" since I tested that.
I have fix the groundsheet to the tent permanently with four pieces of heavyduty elastic
(that have some 1cm freeplay).
And I fixed shoestrings to the groundsheet (and glued them there) along the long ends
to the vestibule-straps where they can slide along some 1cm.
This way the groundsheet stays in position perfectly and doesn't need any
misalignment-attention anymore.
Update 2 october 2023
The zipperrunner I always use(d) has died
and so the zipper refuses to be closed with that runner anymore.
Which means I have to use the other one, which is always a hazzle to get used to.
To my opinion* that is a rather short livespan (of about 1 full year in total of daily usage).
But my opinion* could be incorrect.
A regular-sized zipper has some 5 teeth per centimeter and in a regular trekkingtent
the zipper might be 3 meters long (ie 1x the length and 1x the height of the tent).
That means the runner forces about 1500 teethsets into each other each time you close the tent.
Since opening does not wear out the zipper opening is of no effect, only the closing does.
Depending on the situation you are in the zipper makes a lot of meters per day.
Is it an overnighter or maybe a longer stay ?
Are there flies, musquitos, ants, elifants, snakes, etc near ?
Are you travelling in sandy and/or windy areas ?
Many aspects have a lot of impact at the zippers lifetime.
Anyway, the quality of the zippers is very important but is never specified .
Updates 3 october 2023
I have repaired several (all) cracks in the flysheet .
It is difficult to analyse but to my opinion the flysheet is quite furnable for ripping.
All in a sudden I see another next rip ...
For the time being I managed to repair them with the
fantastic repairtape Quechua from Decathlon 🖱️ .
But few days later the flysheet has several new cracks and rips
and these are to many and to widely spread to repair.
This is the final indication that the flysheet-material is at it's end of life .
And so the tent is ...
Update 4 october 2023
After two full summerseasons with lots of sun it was Babet, the storm, that finished the job ...
That evening terrible winds completely finished the flysheet.
It was ripped completely into pieces and there was nothing to repair anymore.
Update 5 october 2023
I cycled 2 x 20kms in the rain to Jaen, Spain, to buy another tent.
It was clear there would not be an official outdoor model available at the Decathlon
but I bought a small and cheap tent.
All day it was raining more or less and the tent was waiting for me without roof ...
When I returned there was quite some water in the innertent and almost all was wet.
I tried to get the new flysheet over the old tent as quickly as possible and that worked pretty well.
It was not wide enough but it was long enough.
Question was what the next stormwinds would manage to do.
But once more the wind was to strong, and several times that flysheet came off.
And twice more things got wet when I was somewhere else, probably waiting for the rain to stop ...
Finally I managed to beat the wind by securing two of my cyclingbags as weight to keep the flysheet down.
Update 6 october 2023
One day I forgot to take some food with me, so out of the tent.
Yes, animals like that to !
It was the first time I had some food inside,
just because I could not really keep it outside anymore because of all the damage.
Ver dict november 2023
For this tent it is now end Of Life.
Lifetime has been about 260 days netto in two summerseasons.
So days fulltime in the strong sunlight, with temperatures up to 46C over several days
and over 40C over months.
In the shadow that was, where the tent was not in.
There are most likely hardly any other travellers using tents up to these extreme longterm conditions.
Anyway, it also means the price has been exactly € 1 per day of use.
And anyway2, my expectations might be to high regarding being leightweight
and having a long lifetime in these situations.
Remark
The
Exped Orion2 UL 🖱️
I dumped before had exactly the same problem, plus another one, being at least as bad and inconvenient.
It lasted three years (wich took two flysheets) but was four times more expensive.
You find the related cyclingblog
here 🖱️
⏫
