Outdoor Connections “air poles” have bladders of tough high-quality TPU (Thermoplastic Polyurethane) which has excellent tear resistance and flexibility and are enclosed within “Dura Sleeve” bonded poly 300 fabric. Simply pump up the poles with high volume hand pump and watch the tent quickly erect itself. Air Ridge poles* are then added to provide additional stability.
Air pole replace traditional poles and when pumped up to 8-10psi they form a string and stable pole structure. The air pole has an oversized internal TPU bladder which is flexible with good stretch characteristics. The outer sleeve is made of strong PE tarp material with an outer polyester layer which is very strong and gives protection and shape to the pole.
*The Adventure Air does not require air ridge poles due to its compact size
Let's hear what Sandy, our General Manager, got to say about Air Pole Technology.
Transcript:
We use our air pole technology on our air pole range of tents and a lot of people are still unsure of how they work, so I just want to describe an air pole, and how it works.
Probably the best way of describing it is it's like an old football. If you take the bladder out of an old football and pump that up, it blows up to a much larger size than the football. It's the skin of the football that keeps its shape and allows the pressure. It's much the same as with one of these air poles.
This is just one of the sample poles that we have but, there's a Boston valve on there which is where you pump it up, and inside there's a bladder.
Now the bladders oversized and it's made of a thing called Thermoplastic Polyurethane or TPU. So this plastic has excellent characteristics for stretch, it can stretch up to quite a large size, but the sleeve that the bladder goes into is what gives it its shape and keeps its size.
They've also got some flexibility and they are strong and they'll spring back into shape. So what I'm going to do here is, I'm going to pump this bladder up and show you that it can grow a lot larger than what the actual air pole is.
So you can see already it's getting larger. So we thought we'd have a bit of fun and see if we could burst this, and you can see, look how big it's got compared to its normal size. So you can see it's never going to burst inside this tube. I'm a bit puffed because I've been pumping for ages. It's still under 5 psi by the way.