Tent Pegs & Stakes | Wild Camping Tent Peg Selection | V Peg vs Y Peg Titanium and DAC Tent Pegs

Hi folks, I'm Seamus from Outdoors Inspiration and this is my German Shepherd Petra! Get off! Welcome to Outdoors Inspiration Outdoor Essentials. And the producers asked me to cover pegs today, which is kind of handy because I've got a bit of washing that needed hanging out. I'll just go and get my socks, bear with me a second. Hello Seamus, you said pegs? Yeah, well yeah, well I thought if I did, you know, yeah I've got wooden ones and plastic ones, not those sort of pegs. They don't need to see, they don't need to see my underwear. Well yeah, I know, but yeah, um, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, wrong end of the stick again. Yeah, the sort of things they'd use wild camping for their tents. Yeah, all right, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, right you are. Looks like I made a bit of a technical error there. Pegs, well they range from the very, very small to the very, very big, but which one is the right one for you? But only you can answer that for yourself, really. All I can do is talk about the range of things that I use in the places that I go for the stuff that I do. All tents and shelters, generally speaking, come supplied with a set of pegs from the manufacturer, and by and large they're going to do the trick 99.9% of the time that you're out with that tent or shelter. I just thought it would make some interesting content to to look at pegs in a little bit more detail. So to my mind there are four factors to consider when selecting pegs. The first one is the type of ground that you're going to be putting that peg into. Is it stony ground? Is it peaty ground? Is it wet ground? Is it dry ground? Only you can answer that on the day that you're pitching your tent. For ground that holds a lot of stone in it, something with a smaller diameter, a needle type affair, that is strong and tough, that can find its way between the gaps in the soil, is probably preferable. For softer ground, let's use sand and snow as an extreme example. Pegs that present a greater surface area. And so that's point number two to consider, the surface area presented by the peg. And number three is the length of the peg. Clearly if you can drive it into the ground further it's going to present more resistance to the ground and hold your guy ropes in place. And number four is the material that the peg is made from. Clearly a plastic peg is not going to take the same amount of abuse that a steel peg is going to. But the tent pegs may form a not insignificant part of the overall tent package weight. These toothpicks, for example, were originally issued with Terranova tents. But you might find that these pegs are insufficient if that tent structure is challenged by the weather, high winds, or even possibly uneven or broken ground where these are going to struggle to get any purchase. But in fairness you don't have to step up too high in diameter and weight for the pegs to become a little bit more effective. These are a selection of shepherd's hook style pegs. Now this one I'm not so fond of. That's a steel peg that's come with a very cheap shelter and it weighs quite a bit, quite tough, easy to replace, but nonetheless not my favourite kind of peg. That can go. This is not much more of a step up from the titanium hook but a little bit more effective than that. But I'd want something with a little bit more holding power. We're into another shepherd's hook here. This one's a more of a traditional sort of shape. Again not my favourite kind of thing. This probably weighs about 18 grams as opposed to 10 or 11 grams with a more lightweight aluminium peg. And yes this is the aluminium version, a little bit shorter, and it weighs around the 11 gram mark. So that would be my favoured kind of peg out of those shepherd hooks probably. In terms of presenting a large surface area to the ground these plastic pegs are quite effective. Injection moulded plastic but they're quite bulky. I'm not going to be carrying 15 of these in my rucksack to be perfectly honest with you. So that can go for a moment. And then of course there's nails like this beastie here. It's about 25 centimetres long and very very effective in hard ground. But again it's not something that I'm likely to carry at about 60 grams each in my rucksack. When it comes to presenting a good surface area to the ground and saving weight and having a strong rigid peg structure the v-pegs favour very very well. This v-peg is made of titanium so it makes it very strong and very light. I have bent one of these in the past but I think this was originally made by Vargo. I might be wrong but I think it's a Vargo v-peg. This one's got holes in it to make it more lightweight and again it's titanium. There is an ongoing debate about where a v-peg is placed to be at its strongest in the ground so having the apex pressing forward this way doesn't present the surface area in the same way as having it facing this way. It would still capture the guy rope. It isn't as structurally strong when being pulled on in this direction and maybe, just maybe, we might better demonstrate that in a moment. And now these are a couple of DAC pegs, both v-pegs, both very very similar. This one's issued with a Hilleberg tent and this one came with an MSR tent. To my mind they look extremely similar. Now a round cross-section on a peg when placed in the ground and with a guy line over it does have the disadvantage that it may rotate and if it rotates and pulls then the guy line can come free. A huge advantage of the v-peg however is that once it's in the ground it's less likely to rotate because it's offering resistance from the v-shape under the ground. Now just working on improving that holding capability in the ground and presenting more area not being able to rotate is the y-beam peg. These are very very strong and do an excellent job. They will hold in the ground very very well. Their strength and durability however will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. And then we've got nail type stakes. So these will have, generally speaking, a broader cross-section to present more surface area but will go into the ground more easily. This one I'm not going to carry in a month for Sundays because it weighs too much. It's made of steel. Very very effective though. I'm sure it holds very very well. And this one from Big Sky is very very effective. It's around 20 centimeters long and it weighs in the region I think about 11 grams. It's actually hollow and it's a tube. So it's a tube stake and it works very very effectively. I like these a lot but I tend to use them in conjunction with other pegs as well. And I do get a lot of comments on my windy wild camps from people that are very fond of the Delta anchors. They seem to come highly recommended. But I don't use them. I might try them one day but there's a reason why I don't use them. And that's because I tend to use the manufacturer's pegs. So in this case this is a DAC peg from Hilleberg. They're very very good quality. But if the weather's getting up I carry a small handful of these Big Sky tube stakes and they can be used in conjunction back staked with the original stake. And I'll show you how I use two of these together in just a moment. So I've got some digital scales with me today. I thought I'd set up a little experiment to look at the power of various pegs. One word of caution though is that I'm going to select a piece of ground. The variables are quite great as to what the peg is actually gripping to at any one time with any one peg during this experiment. And of course there's also the subjectivity of how hard I pull. I'm not going to put any dynamic force into it. I'm not going to snatch. It's going to be a constant pull. But it will give us a generality, an overview of the gripping power of different types of pegs. So for this particular peg it's a steel shepherd's hook. In reality the peg does not have to go back at an angle. The whole purpose of putting it back at an angle is to retain the guy on top of it. It's actually at its most useful when it's directly upright but that won't work if the guy slips off the top. So we always put it back at a little bit of an angle. You can place them in with your hand. Now this is really bad practice and you can bend and wreck pegs by just rocking your foot on it but it's what I've always done so I'm going to continue to do it. So I've got some electronic scales which are in turn connected to a guy line. The guy line is actually dyneema so it has no stretch in it and we've got the camera at the other end looking down at the peg. So hopefully if I get this set up right you'll be able to see the amount of pressure that's being exerted in terms of kilograms and the moment that peg moves. This is quite tough ground here and very stony so let's see what the outcomes are. Okay so this is the steel shepherd's hook. I'm going to try and keep an eye on this and an eye on the stake at the same time to see when it moves. Here we go and it's moving. I think that was around 10 kilograms when it started to move but we'll have another look at that when I process the video and I'll put it in a caption below. Now I'm going to try and find an area that hasn't been disturbed by the previous peg so I'm going to just go to one side and we'll put in a v-peg now. Trying to get the angle in at the same angle as the previous peg but as I said this is generalities not absolutes. Let's see how we get on with this one. Okay dac v-peg and I think it just started to move there. I think that was around the 15 kilogram mark. We'll go for a y-beam peg now. So this is the y-beam peg. Try and keep an eye on it at the same time. I'm struggling to pull that out. That one was a bit more of a struggle. 30 kilograms on that occasion to try and move that and it just moved a little bit. So the construction of pegs is very very important so the y-beam peg presents a great surface area but if it's made of substandard materials what actually happened was it bent in the ground. I had a suspicion it would. These are the ones that came with a particular tent and I've replaced them all because I've bent about I don't know four so far so this is number five. So next let's look at a big sky tube stake see how that fares. So this is the big sky tube stake. It's longer than the other stakes and I suspect it's going to hold very very well. Okay so start to put the pressure on. Keep an eye on it at the same time. There we go and I think that started to move in the ground at about 35 kilograms. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to use a v-stake but rather than using it in the traditional sense I'm going to reverse it so it presents a much greater surface area. Now I suspect with this peg even though it's titanium that it will not be strong enough in that direction. Let's see. So this is now the reversed v-peg and it's a broad section titanium v-peg. Oh goodness me 30. Oh there we go. I couldn't quite make that out but it was about 40 kilograms when that started to move. I suspect that the peg bent before the ground gave and there we have it absolutely nudgered. So what that's telling me is that the peg has held but unfortunately the structure of the peg hasn't supported the amount of weight that went into it. It took a lot of pressure but it wasn't the strongest construction that way around. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to use the Big Sky tube stake again but this time I'm going to back stake it with a DAC Hilleberg issued v-peg and let's see how that fares. No fancy stuff going on here. I'm just going into the tag of that peg. I could extend that tag make it longer. I'm just going to back stake it with a v-peg in there now and that's going to aid me in a couple of ways. Not only is it giving me rigid support here but it's also maintaining the tag so that the guy stays on the peg. There's no way that this guy can lift off unless that tag breaks. I'm going to try and keep an eye on the whole kit and caboodle and see what the weight is. I can't move that. When the scales say error it's in excess of 40 kilograms so I'm going to swap my scales for a much larger set and we see how we get on there. So here we go a much larger set of scales these only go as far as 50 kilograms and I'm sure that we can get the needle off the scale without budging those particular tent stakes and that's putting some real dynamic force into it. I cannot move that. It's just moving now in the ground I can see it I can see it pulling forward but it's being restrained by the other peg. So they have moved a bit so they had moved the ground a little bit I think that's where I was putting some dynamic force in and really tugging on it and I don't want to labour it too far but if your anchor point gives that's one guy line that's flying in the breeze that's going to distribute the forces that that was accepting onto the other guy lines and other parts of the structure as well so it's very important to make sure if it's windy conditions that you guide very securely. So with one of my Hilleberg tents using the standard Y pegs that came with that pitching it in 50 mile an hour winds managed to sever two guy lines one cut right the way through and I felt it go bang and the tent lurch and I had to get out and knot it very very quickly when I checked the other side the other one was frayed through to within a couple of a couple of strands of the guy line it was going to go as well. Sharp bits of metal in contact with textile or cordage can cut it and this peg let's not forget is made of titanium but used in the wrong way its structure is very weak and you might well say well that's all a bit extreme Seamus pulling like hell and using bloody great scales on your on your tent pegs to see how effective they are and you're right 99.9% of the time enjoy your camping use what you've got with the tent no bother at all good girl onwards and upwards up we go