A tent peg (or tent stake) is a spike, usually with a hook or hole on the top end, typically made from wood, metal, plastic, or composite material, pushed or driven into the ground for holding a tent to the ground, either directly by attaching to the tent's material, or by connecting to ropes attached to the tent. Traditionally, a tent peg is improvised from a section of a small tree branch, if possible with a small side branch cut off to leave a hook, driven into the ground narrower end first.
A tent will typically be pegged to the ground by a combination of both direct attachment to the tent's material and via ropes.
Tent pegs are used to help maintain the tent's shape, and to hold the tent in place against wind.
Tent pegs are preferably pushed into the ground by hand. However, hard ground, or bigger tent pegs, will require a tent peg mallet to drive them into the ground.
A tent peg provides the greatest holding ability when it is inserted into the ground so that the point of attachment of the rope is at ground level. This minimises the rope's ability to apply leverage to the tent peg, which can loosen or pull the tent peg from the ground.
Above, the emphasis is on leverage and in recent years a new type of tent peg has been developed which eliminates leverage. The addition of an arm at the top of the peg enables the tension to be directed to a point beneath the ground where the soil is firm. The peg is 'balanced' with little or no leverage (moment). This new peg style presents a greater surface area to resist tension in guys.
Tent pegs come in wide variety of shapes, sizes, and materials.
The type of tent peg best suited to a tent will be determined by several factors, such as:
Better quality tent pegs will have symmetrical tips, either conical or V-shaped, to ensure that they can be driven into the ground without veering off alignment. [1] They will also typically have hook extensions to allow the end of the hook to be also driven into the ground, providing a second ground contact point, to reduce the risk that the peg may turn in the ground under tension and allow the rope it is holding to slip off the hook. [1] [2]
Other styles of tent pegs have fully formed eyes through which the rope is passed so that the rope cannot come off the peg no matter which direction the peg is oriented. The Delta (or dog-leg) shape peg always points toward the tent and can never turn. The guy is partially buried and cannot slip off the hook. [3] Delta shaped pegs lie level with the soil offering maximum safety. The rope pulls against the ground rather than levering a straight peg at one end. Metal delta pegs can be springy, absorbing wind shocks.
Some types of tent pegs are made from flat material pressed into a shallow "V" shape cross section. [4] This type of tent peg relies on the broadness of the section to not turn under tension. [5]
Tent peg types and styles may typically vary in length from 150mm to 490mm, and in thickness from 1.6 mm to 3.2 mm for flat section tent pegs and from 4 mm to 11.2 mm for wire rod [2] [6] [7] tent pegs. Smaller wire tent pegs are also available, especially where weight is critical.
Plastic tent pegs are typically very wide and longer than metal pegs, and are used for softer ground types, sand and light soils. [7] [8] [9]
Ultralight U-shaped aluminium alloy tent pegs are used in snow and sand, each peg weighing around 45 g. These pegs can be planted into sand or snow, head outward away from the tent at a 45 degree angle from the ground, with the tent or a guy line attached to the head area. The pegs can also be used by tying the guy lines to the middle hole, laying them flat at the bottom of a hole sand or snow, and then burying them.
Heavy duty tent pegs may be made from angle iron from 2.5mm to 5mm thick, and have the hook welded into the open side of the angle, meaning that the open angle faces the tent, bracing the open angle of the tent peg against the tension. [10]
Tent pegs may be manufactured from steel rod or wire, pressed flat steel, aluminium section, titanium alloy, [11] angle iron, plastic, polycarbonate, [8] polypropylene, [8] polystyrene, [7] or ABS plastic. [7] Steel tent pegs are typically zinc plated or stainless steel. Untreated metal tent pegs are available. Carbon fibre [11] metal tipped tent pegs are also manufactured. Wooden tent pegs are now not common, with higher strength to weight ratio, and high durability, materials being used instead.
Armies on the move have often used tents for sleeping accommodation overnight. A tactic used by an opposing force was to initiate an attack by riding on horse back at speed through an army's tents knocking the tent pegs out of the ground thereby collapsing tents on the enemy as they slept providing a means to hinder the enemy while a more direct attack took place. This practice has now developed into a stylised equestrian sport in various forms called tent pegging.
The Book of Judges provides the story of Jael, the wife of Heber, a Kenite tentmaker in which Jael kills Sisera by driving a tent peg through his temple as he sleeps. (4:21) Tent pegs have also been used as murder weapons in recent history, for example in the murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins.
Other uses of tent pegs are as improvised climbing pitons, for example in the siege of the Sogdian Rock and Jean-Christophe Lafaille's self rescue on Annapurna.
A chisel is a tool with a characteristically shaped cutting edge of blade on its end; for carving or cutting a hard material such as wood, stone, or metal by hand, struck with a mallet, or mechanical power. The handle and blade of some types of chisel are made of metal or wood with a sharp edge in it.
A tent is a shelter consisting of sheets of fabric or other material draped over, attached to a frame of poles or a supporting rope. While smaller tents may be free-standing or attached to the ground, large tents are usually anchored using guy ropes tied to stakes or tent pegs. First used as portable homes by nomads, tents are now more often used for recreational camping and as temporary shelters.
In agriculture, fences are used to keep animals in or out of an area. They can be made from a wide variety of materials, depending on terrain, location and animals to be confined. Most agricultural fencing averages about 4 feet (1.2 m) high, and in some places, the height and construction of fences designed to hold livestock is mandated by law.
A winch is a mechanical device that is used to pull in or let out or otherwise adjust the tension of a rope or wire rope.
A coil spring is a type of spring made out of a long piece of metal that is wound around itself. Coil springs were in use in Roman times, evidence of this can be found in bronze Fibulae — the clasps worn by Roman soldiers among others. These are quite commonly found in Roman archeological digs.
A grommet is a ring or edge strip inserted into a hole through thin material, typically a sheet of textile fabric, sheet metal or composite of carbon fiber, wood or honeycomb. Grommets are generally flared or collared on each side to keep them in place, and are often made of metal, plastic, or rubber. They may be used to prevent tearing or abrasion of the pierced material or protection from abrasion of the insulation on the wire, cable, line being routed through the penetration, and to cover sharp edges of the piercing, or all of the above.
A mallet is a tool used for imparting force on another object, often made of rubber or sometimes wood, that is smaller than a maul or beetle, and usually has a relatively large head.
A die is a specialized machine tool used in manufacturing industries to cut and/or form material to a desired shape or profile. Stamping dies are used with a press, as opposed to drawing dies and casting dies which are not. Like molds, dies are generally customized to the item they are used to create.
A baler or hay baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Often, bales are configured to dry and preserve some intrinsic value of the plants bundled. Different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale – rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
A fastener or fastening is a hardware device that mechanically joins or affixes two or more objects together. In general, fasteners are used to create non-permanent joints; that is, joints that can be removed or dismantled without damaging the joining components. Steel fasteners are usually made of stainless steel, carbon steel, or alloy steel.
A fish hook or fishhook, formerly also called angle, is a hook used to catch fish either by piercing and embedding onto the inside of the fish mouth (angling) or, more rarely, by impaling and snagging the external fish body. Fish hooks are normally attached to a line, which tethers the target fish to the angler for retrieval, and are typically dressed with some form of bait or lure that entices the fish to swallow the hook out of its own natural instinct to forage or hunt.
A guy-wire, guy-line, guy-rope, down guy, or stay, also called simply a guy, is a tensioned cable designed to add stability to a freestanding structure. They are used commonly for ship masts, radio masts, wind turbines, utility poles, and tents. A thin vertical mast supported by guy wires is called a guyed mast. Structures that support antennas are frequently of a lattice construction and are called "towers". One end of the guy is attached to the structure, and the other is anchored to the ground at some distance from the mast or tower base. The tension in the diagonal guy-wire, combined with the compression and buckling strength of the structure, allows the structure to withstand lateral loads such as wind or the weight of cantilevered structures. They are installed radially, usually at equal angles about the structure, in trios and quads. As the tower leans a bit due to the wind force, the increased guy tension is resolved into a compression force in the tower or mast and a lateral force that resists the wind load. For example, antenna masts are often held up by three guy-wires at 120° angles. Structures with predictable lateral loads, such as electrical utility poles, may require only a single guy-wire to offset the lateral pull of the electrical wires, at a spot where the wires change direction.
A mandrel, mandril, or arbor is a tapered tool against which material can be forged, pressed, stretched or shaped, or a flanged or tapered or threaded bar that grips a workpiece to be machined in a lathe. A flanged mandrel is a parallel bar of a specific diameter with an integral flange towards one end, and threaded at the opposite end. Work is gripped between the flange and a nut on the thread. A tapered mandrel has a taper of approximately 0.005 inches per foot and is designed to hold work by being driven into an accurate hole on the work, gripping the work by friction. A threaded mandrel may have a male or female thread, and work which has an opposing thread is screwed onto the mandrel.
Metalworking hand tools are hand tools that are used in the metalworking field. Hand tools are powered solely by the operator.
A violin consists of a body or corpus, a neck, a finger board, a bridge, a soundpost, four strings, and various fittings. The fittings are the tuning pegs, tailpiece and tailgut, endpin, possibly one or more fine tuners on the tailpiece, and in the modern style of playing, usually a chinrest, either attached with the cup directly over the tailpiece or to the left of it. There are many variations of chinrests: center-mount types such as Flesch or Guarneri, clamped to the body on both sides of the tailpiece, and side-mount types clamped to the lower bout to the left of the tailpiece.
Mechanical screening, often just called screening, is the practice of taking granulated or crushed ore material and separating it into multiple grades by particle size.
Mass finishing is a group of manufacturing processes that allow large quantities of parts to be simultaneously finished. The goal of this type of finishing is to burnish, deburr, clean, radius, de-flash, descale, remove rust, polish, brighten, surface harden, prepare parts for further finishing, or break off die cast runners. The two main types of mass finishing are tumble finishing, also known as barrel finishing, and vibratory finishing. Both involve the use of a cyclical action to create grinding contact between surfaces. Sometimes the workpieces are finished against each other; however, usually a finishing medium is used. Mass finishing can be performed dry or wet; wet processes have liquid lubricants, cleaners, or abrasives, while dry processes do not. Cycle times can be as short as 10 minutes for nonferrous workpieces or as long as 2 hours for hardened steel.
Tube bending is any metal forming processes used to permanently form pipes or tubing. Tube bending may be form-bound or use freeform-bending procedures, and it may use heat supported or cold forming procedures.
A jigsaw is a saw which uses a reciprocating blade to cut irregular curves, such as stenciled designs, in wood, metal, or other materials.
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