Tents that are in stock, are normally shipped the next day, except of course on Fridays and Saturdays when the following day there is no UPS pickup. It takes 6 days maximum to get to California or Maine which are the farthest from us in the continental USA. APO's, Alaska and Hawaii should select Priority Mail as UPS is very expensive to those locations.

Depends on how far away you are. Usually its in the $30-$60 range to US locations. You can find out the exact amount by going through the checkout process and the shipping is shown before you have to pay. Don't worry, as nothing is sent or saved until you pay for the order.

That depends on how busy we are. Generally, items that are listed on the website are already boxed and ready to ship, so we don't like to open them back up and all. We save a lot of money by making them in big batches, so custom orders can run up the price.

A good portion of the large white ones are imported, as are very few of the colored ones. Most of the tents are made in house though. All of our tipis, yurts, gers, and regular wedges are made here, as are all the lightweight ones and most of the rounds.

Just the canvas only. The poles, spikes, and ropes are extra.

No. In fact its hard to get waterproofing to stick on a tent that has already had treated. After about 5 years, you should inspect it in the rain and see if you see any drops coming through anywhere and treat that little area with a canvas waterproofer. this can happen at seams that are stressed in the wind or get rubbed a lot, but not in regular use.

We fix it! We had some bad blue and red fabric last year that got sewn into some Viking wedges and I believe we have replaced or refunded the purchaser on all of them at our expense. You can send back anything defective and we will fix it! If you don't like your tent, you can return it in new condition for a refund. (Some custom stuff you can't, like if you HAVE to have a pink and olive round and now it makes you sick, I never want to see it again)

There is no such thing as a fire-proof tent! If you get a flame on a fire-retardant tent, you get a big hole and the tent is ruined or requires repair. A non-treated tent will usually keep burning, but not so fast that you can't just walk out of it. Normally, it is the bedding that catches fire and the tent just goes along for the ride, so don't use unprotected flames inside any tent. As for the cost of losing a tent in a fire, keep in mind you can buy 2 untreated ones from us, and burn one down and still be money ahead, but thats just my opinion. We do make fire-retardant tents but they are all-white and not in colors yet. There are spray-on fire treatments out there on the internet that work pretty good also.

Batches. We can make 30 tents in the time it normally takes to make 5 because we can set up the machines and do one operation over and over. This also means that when we have them, we have a bunch of colors! The imported ones come in bulk too, so we have a bunch of them at the same time also. Mainly what drives our cost is the fabric cost.

Again this goes with the batch thing somewhat, but the real reason is that our warehouse is not very big and gets full pretty fast. Twice this year the sewing areas filled up with tents and we had to stop sewing!

We only sell at discounts to resellers and thats not a big discount really as we are already about as cheap as we can get. There is no shipping discount unless you want to buy pallets, as tents ship in individual boxes. Sometimes with odd mixes of tents and parts it ends up costing more or less to ship. If less, I refund the difference, but if more, I usually eat that cost. Shipping generally costs about half what most people think as we get a great discount from UPS.

Just try back in an hour. Sometimes it too loud to hear my cellphone or I forgot to charge it again. I used to have the mailbox set up, but I just ended up with 50 messages of "please call me" and people wanted to talk for hours on end about some weird tent idea at my expense. I like talking to people, mind you, but if I do it all day, nobody gets any tents as there are only 2 of us here! When I get the new warehouse built over in Iowa, I will be able to get enough inventory that I can get ahead and do more custom work and talk more on the phone.

YES. We have at least one auction running most of the time, and our user name is midwest_tent. You can find us by searching "sca tent". You can also find some other sellers selling junk on there so be wary of the expensive but lame looking nylon stuff from overseas.

We like to think it is more authentic, because of the sewn grommets (which are actually stronger!), and the lack of party-tent dags. The fact is, there are some pretty good tent companies in the USA, including Panther, Tentmasters, Tentsmiths, and a lot of tipi and wall tent companies. There are also some junk makers out there but they don't last very long (we can hope). Every tentmaker has made a few dogs, but the ones I have listed and some others, will stand by their products. The main thing is, if you don't like something, call us or your tent manufacturer and they will almost always bend over backwards to fix a problem. With custom made stuff, odd things can happen. The key is, don't wait for the event to put up a tent, no matter WHO you got it from! Put it up early and check it out, and make a list of all the stuff you want to take so you don't forget something.

We ran out of room. When we are in the new warehouse (January 2012 - delayed due to Missouri River flood of 2011) we will have them back. We do have frame brackets for wall tents and squares and will soon have some center poles.

You can paint your tent but you must waterproof it afterwards. The way paint affects a tent, is to block the normal flow of water off the tent. There is a balance between slope and water tension that allows a water-repellent tent to drain. If you block the flow with paint, the water will just rain in. Remember those old army tents that if you touched them they would drip where you touched? Those tents carried 60% of the water on the inside surface so breaking the tension would cause a new path for the water in the form of a drip. Newer water-repellent tents carry about 2% on the inner surface and when it hits a paint barrier, it will leak at that point. The solution is to use a more aggressive waterproofing chemical that makes 100% of the water go on the outside. The tent will breathe less well, but you usually would only treat the roof as walls are not generally a problem if you paint them.