We’d put an OzTent up against any other tent in regards to durability any day of the week, but sometimes even the best products need a few repairs.
OzTent’s are tough, we’ve dragged them across the ground, left them out in torrential downpours, and they’ve spent thousands of miles on the roofs of our trucks. They do have one major weakness though, the corner hinges that hold the tent’s together are plastic and can break as we recently discovered. Here’s our quick and easy, or long and hard OzTent hinge repair.
We discovered the problem after UPS dropped off our new RV-4. After we had unpacked the tent we quickly discovered all 3 brackets on the end were broken. Now for the record we’ve never managed to break one of these pieces in the field over the 3 years that we’ve been using OzTent’s, so you have to be pretty rough to cause this to happen.
The most common cause of this type of damage is when someone (in this case UPS) drops the tent hard on the end. Now UPS is as gentle with their packages as Floyd Mayweather is with his wife, so just make sure to keep that in mind when you take delivery.
Luckily OzTent’s customer service is second to none, and they are quick to ship you replacement hardware. We placed a call on a Monday morning and had the new hinges in hand by the weekend.
Now here’s the fun part, installing them is as easy as spending an afternoon at the DMV. There’s a quick and easy shortcut, but we didn’t find out until after the fact, so we’ll share the hard way first.
First you’ll want to make sure you have a hacksaw, drill, and a set of needle nose pliers on hand. Then you’ll remove the frame from inside of the tent, it’s held in with a few Velcro straps that you can’t miss.
We originally tried to pull the plastic pieces out of the frame but didn’t have any luck so we used the hacksaw to trim off as much as possible before drilling out the pieces.
Then we used the pliers to pull out the remaining plastic pieces before inserting the new brackets. You’ll probably want a rubber mallet or dead blow to tap them in.
Now here’s the quick way directly from OzTent. “Use a set of vice grips and clamp them down as tight as possible on a piece of the plastic. Then use a hammer to tap the vice grips which will pull the plastic out.” We haven’t tried it, but apparently it works quite well.
Hope this saves you guys some time, but if you need an excuse to stay in the garage with some of your buddies for a few hours to drink beer, do it the hard way.
bought oztent rv3. opened it up and pulled up tent by main extrusion (top front alum support bar) bent. still trying to work out how to get bent alum bar out of 2 hinges to put new bar in. next trip corner piece at rear buckled . . paid 1000aus the aluminium frame is weak full stop..great design but crap frame. oz tent made in china. would not buy again .
Terry, replacing the hinge is a pain in the butt, but the frame is overall pretty durable. Mine came broken courtesy of UPS, I’d muscle through the repair and then I think you’ll be happy with the final product.
I used a pair of multigrips and used a heat gun the plastic part popped right out, obviously I don’t use the heat gun for too long.
Great idea, I never considered using this technique. Hopefully it saves time for some of the other guys out there with the same problem.
Bloody ripper tip with the heat gun I was stumped! I was down 4 drill bits, two holes in frame one bucket of ball sweat and very nearly a wife!
Parts were delivered promptly but I’d rather have taken it back as it was under warranty still!
Nothing a few frothies won’t fix. Let’s go camping!
Hahahaha couldn’t have put this better myself. I remember doing this in the driveway with a group of friends and if it wasn’t for them, the tent might have ended up at the bottom of the pool.