Your Cart is Empty
The biggest upgrade on the new GFC Platform Camper V2 Pro? Easily the tent. Let’s dive into the new design, and explain everything that changed.
“The flexible poles in a ground tent provide a tension balancing effect,” describes GFC product engineer Ian Sparkman. But the frame in a GFC camper or rooftop tent doesn’t provide that same flex. That adds challenge to the fabric manufacturing process.
“Our design has to be manufactured very repeatably to ensure a tight fit that does’t flap in the wind,” continues Ian.
Adding to that difficulty, the tension needs to be held through the corners and areas of the tent that don’t contain windows and zippers. Otherwise, too much tension in the zippers can render them reluctant to operate. Testing this requires iterating and testing small changes in fabric patterns and construction techniques.
That’s actually one area where the very strong GFC frame works better with fabric than the flexible frame in ground tents does. GFC’s rigidity means the tent opens repeatably every time, where in a ground tent, the pole spacing and location changes slightly with every setup due to terrain and the vagaries inherent in humans pounding stakes into the ground at varying angles and locations.
“Once we arrive at a design with stable tension, we know it will be reliably tensioned every time the tent is popped,” says Ian.
And all of that has to be assembled by a small team working out of our Belgrade factory. Producing the Pro tent required that half the existing sewing machines be replaced with more sophisticated models. Much of the design work focusses around process optimization to make producing the tent body faster and more repeatable.
Ian goes on to to explain that a lot of the initial design process focussed on improving ventilation and managing condensation. Where the old tent had no ability to actively exhaust hot air and moisture, the new one leverages convection to draw cool, dry in, while expelling hot, moist air outwards.
“To successfully vent the old tent, the doors needed to be at least partially open,” Ian says. On the new tent, always-open, but weather-shielded vents at the tent’s peak allow moist air to escape. Zipping open the lower portion of the doors or opening the small windows in the tent’s narrow end then allows that escaping air to draw in fresh stuff from outside. Overall, there’s 52.5 percent more ventilation area on the new design.
“Convection takes care of the air circulation to keep the tent full of cooler, less-stale air while you're hanging out or sleeping inside,” explains Ian.
That process reduces the tendency for moisture created by your breath and body to build up on interior surfaces in the form of condensation. Should some of that moisture remain present, the non-woven marine polyester headliner is designed to work like a technical base layer, capturing water droplets and spreading them out through a wicking process. The increases surface area of that moisture then allows the improved ventilation to better evaporate that moisture.
To test this, GFC’s engineering team created conditions that, according to them, “were prime for condensation." That’s cool and dry on the outside, and hot and wet inside. Ian then did pushups inside closed campers—old and new—to increase respiration and work up a sweat.
“In the old tent, we saw water beading on the composite roof and sometimes even on the inner wall of the fabric,” he describes. “In the new tent, even without the headliner, we saw significantly less moisture accumulating, and could even feel the outflow of warm air through the upper vents.”
The team also tested several alternate fabrics for the tent construction, but during accelerated wear cycles, found none that could retain their waterproof performance as well as the current TPU-backed custom 300-Denier ripstop nylon.
But that didn’t mean improvements couldn’t be made. Seams were eliminated where possible to eliminate potential points of failure, tack stitches were added to areas under high tension, and areas where the tent is connected to the camper frame—particularly the corners—were redesigned to add strength and minimize potential wear.
And other areas of the camper were redesigned to reduce tent wear too. The corners of the Transform-A-Floor panels have been rounded off on the Pro and fitted with plastic shields, to prevent the possibility of catching and tearing the tent while moving those around. Zipper seams receive additional welding to reinforce for strength, and anything that could be strengthened or optimized also received attention.
“On the outside, the first thing people will notice is the overall aesthetic,” Ian says. “The lines follow the frame much more closely, and the doors are significantly larger as a result.” The Stanford-trained product designer also details that all exposed zippers are now covered by flaps, and says you’ll notice the new coil zippers run much more smoothly, with, “a satisfying feeling and sound.”
“On the inside, you will notice how cozy the headliner makes the space feel, and how much more open the viewing area is once you’ve opened all the doors and windows,” he continues. “It’s a much more open feeling than the previous design.”
“On a windy night, you might notice the lack of jingling from the zippers,” Ian says. “We also hated that, so we had custom zipper pulls made and attached them to the sliders without metal attachments, for a much quieter experience.”
But it’s the improved ventilation that Ian says customers will most appreciate. “The ventilation, while only consisting of a few small improvements, make an outsize difference overnight.”
“Fully open, the sheer volume of viewable space is unreal,” Ian says of his favorite improvement, which has added 69.5 percent more viewable area. “The sheer area of viewable space is unreal, it almost feels as if there is no tent there at all.”
And don’t forget, you can take advantage of all these improvement even if you already own a GFC. Pro upgrade accessories are currently on sale for a limited time, through 9/18.
