The summertime show season is upon us, and that means a great number of people will be breaking – or outright losing – pop-up shelters.

For some of you, the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon are well known and obvious, but they aren’t always apparent to folks just getting started…or even more seasoned people.

The problem is this: People anchor the feet and/ or legs of their shelter, and then the wind kicks up. The canopy catches the wind, applies a proportionally large force to the legs and their fittings, and that’s all she wrote. Something in the frame deforms, or downright breaks. Alternatively, you may experience the unbridled hilarity of the pop-up becoming airborne.

YEEEEEHAAAAWWW!

It doesn’t help that manufacturers supply consumers of pop-ups with stakes for the feet. This provides a subtle bit of (incorrect) encouragement that an adequate anchoring method is to prevent the feet from moving. Staking the feet is good for keeping things in order against an errant foot or soccer ball, but not much else.

So, what’s the key? The key is to prevent movement of the system component that imparts force to the rest of the system. In the case of wind, the legs impart very little force to everything else. The canopy cover itself, though, is capable of tearing the whole mess to pieces when it gets moving. Expressed as a simple machine, the cover is the arm of a lever. If you want to stop a lever from moving, you prevent movement at the arm – not the fulcrum.

Thus, what you want to anchor is the canopy cover, or the part of the frame that supports the cover. If that doesn’t move, then nothing else will move, and your canopy will live to fight another day.