Spartatarp - A review

We were recently approached to review a couple of items from Spartatarp, they were a tarp and a hank of paracord. These items were sent to us so that we could perform an independent review with no bias.

I have use this tarp over the past month each weekend and this is how it performed.

It's in a nice red carry bag with a cool logo, the tarp itself is black, and is roughly 10ft by 9ft and it also comes with some short but quite thick alloy pegs. It's got 19 attachment points, 16 around the edge and 3 along the ridge but the thing that makes it a little different from other tarps is that the corner attactments are regular webbing but all the other attachment points are heavy duty 15mm elastic webbing. Now this is a clever design as it adds in a touch of suspension when the weather is against you and the wind gets up. Also for the weight conscious amongst you it comes in at a mere 600g !!

The logo is prominent and only on one corner and while this may discourage some people, I think it looks quite cool.

The fabric it's made of is lightweight ripstop nylon with a waterproof coating inside, it's very nice looking fabric having the same look as the carbon fiber scales you'd find on a top quality knife handle. If you know ripstop then you'll know this will be a tough and reliable material that should last.

Here you can see the underside of the tarp, the crosshatched weave and the waterproof coating, it's looking very impressive so far.

The webbing tabs are reinforced with a woven polypropylene layer taking the strain off the main tarp and distributing it evenly across the corner, but as you have elastic webbing tabs too, any extra tension put on the tarp through extreme weather conditions or even by tripping over the guy ropes should be easily absorbed resulting in fewer stresses on the fabric and attachment points.

As my luck would have it, the 4 weekends I spent under the tarp have all been dry, so I couldn't vouch for it's waterproofness. This left me with a quandry as the whole premise of a tarp is too keep you dry, so not wanting to publish a review without this vital issue being broached I decided to do what any genuine bushman would do, I poured 2 gallons of water right onto the tarp!! This is considerably more than you would ever expect the tarp to deal with in any rainstorm you may have the misfortune to be out in, if it's going to leak then this is the time for it to do so, the water column pressure on the fabric must have been quite high at the time but I was confident that it would take the beating...

..and it did, very well. The water bounced off the fabric easily and beaded beautifully as it wiggled and wound it's way down the fabric and onto the forest floor with not a single drop penetrating the material, very impressive and it certainly gave me the confidence to use this tarp during any torrential storm I may be out in.

Above you can see it pegged out with just 4 pegs, one at each corner, a ridge line running under and fixed with two prussic knots to keep the tension.

 

 All in all it makes for a superb piece of kit, one that I'd be happy to carry with me and rely on, especially due to it's lightweight and great fabric construction.

So if you are searching for a new tarp, contact Calum at SPARTA STORE and give serious consideration to this tarp, I don' think you'll be disappointed.