DIY tent stake hack

WoodBow

WKR
Joined
Jul 21, 2015
Messages
1,744
I'm a big fan of the cheap coghlan tent stakes that walmart sells for 76 cents. I know they are 6061 instead of 7075 like the MSR stakes, but I have had good luck with them and they are 4x cheaper. My tipi takes 8 stakes to pitch. In the areas we hunt usually at least 2 of those stakes we will struggle with getting to full depth due to rocks. It's very frustrating to get one almost all the way in and then hit an impenetrable rock. It will not pitch and hold as well if they are not fully driven. We have not yet found ourselves in soil so loose that I did not feel like we could get away with shorter stakes. I just built a megatarp and needed stakes for it so I bought some new ones from walmart and decided to cut them down. Reasons being..(1) increase chances of full depth insertion without encountering obstacle (2) shorter stakes should be more rigid and less likely to bend (3) shorter is lighter obviously.

I used to do a lot of hobby woodwork and a little for hire. I'm a big fan of building jigs for precision work, especially when a single task will be repeated multiple times. You could cerainly just cut stakes down with a hack saw and grind a taper but it would be horrifically inefficient. It took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to design the jig and to build it from some scrap material. Now I can cut a stake down it seconds and it is perfectly tapered and looks factory.

The sled is just a piece of scrap red oak ply. I set the miter gauge to 15 degrees and cut a groove just deeper than the length of the "fins" of the stakes, with the blade canted 30 degrees off of 90. I then used 2 small drops of super glue on a scrap block at the correct distance to yield a 6" stake. Super glue works awesome for this time of application. It is very fast to dry and if I want a different length, a sharp blow will break the bond, and then I can reattach wherever. I got these tiny hold down clamps online by mistake. I was expecting some much larger. But they were very cheap so i just kept them figuring I could use them for something eventually. It worked great for this application.
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I am running a friction blade for cutting metal with a skil saw, in my table saw. I have never seen anyone do this and I am not recommending that you do it. There is certainly a fire hazard if your dust box is not completely empty. However I have employed this technique many times in the past and have never had an issue. Be smart. Use safety equipment.

The process is very simple after a jig is made. Insert stake, clamp, sled rides down fence to make cut, rotate stake, make cut, rotate stake, make cut, and then just knock off the burrs with a file. It worked awesome to hold 3 or 4 at a time and stab them repeatedly into my kids sand box. That polished up the edges nicely. I don't believe I took a pic after I did that.

This pic is before de-burring but shows just how uniform the cut angle is. Not that it matters. It's a tent stake. But i enjoy precision work. If you can see it, there is a perfect trocar on the end. I filed it off later.
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The finished stakes must be very close to .4 oz even though they read .3 on my scale individually. All ten weighed together are 4.0 oz. I didn't think to weigh all 10 together when they were still full length, but individually they weighed 0.6.
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