5. Door Size
- Clam X-400 - 10 points
- Eskimo Outbreak 450XD - 8 points
- Otter Vortex Pro Lodge - 8.5 points
We all owe Eskimo a debt of gratitude for bringing the No Trip Door to market a few seasons back. Anyone who has spent any time tip up fishing in cold weather has doubtless done a bender trying to rush out a hub through a D-door.
In adding a separate panel to their hubs to install a door, Otter and Eskimo wind up with a tapered door which is much narrower at the top than it is at the bottom. The numbers they list for width are always at the widest point along the ice. But they are typically six inches narrower up top, leaving just 24” for the Eskimo and 29” for the Otters. This is why I mentioned in last year’s review of double hubs that I still had to duck and rotate my shoulders to get out of Eskimo’s door, making the Otter door feel much more like a proper door with its extra width. Eskimo uses two vertical poles to support their door which are the same 11mm poles as the rest of the hub and should prove quite durable. Otter adds a third pole across the top of the door and makes them orange so they are easier to locate in the bag. Otter’s are quite thin though and I heard the fiberglass creaking just setting the hubs up for this comparison. The bungee in one of the Lodge's poles is also getting ready to let go and it's brand new. In both cases, the poles are kept loose in the bag. Many people don’t bother putting the poles in to reinforce the doors if they are moving regularly. The pockets for the poles on the Otter Vortex Pro Lodge in this test were so tight that I almost had to go get a screwdriver to open the pocket so the pole would go in. But they were better the second time I set it up after sitting assembled for a few hours.
Clam has finally arrived to the party this season with their hub shelters. They’ve introduced their Max Entry door system, and they’ve taken a different path from the other two in fitting a door in their hubs. Where Eskimo and Otter open one corner of the hub to insert the door in a separate panel, Clam chose to put theirs right into one of the four walls. This was done to yield some significant benefits over the other two, as well as some very significant drawbacks.
The biggest advantage of the door is that it’s huge…much, much bigger than the doors in the other hubs compared. It also doesn’t taper at the top where it remains almost twice as wide as the door in the Outbreak 450XD. If the door is the be all to end all on your must have list, look no further than the X-400. Someone could walk out of the hub while someone else is walking in with this door.
But alas, it does come at a price. The panel that has the door has no hub in it. Instead, it has three permanently attached vertical rods that drop down to the floor and insert into pockets like Eskimo’s and Otter’s door reinforcements. Only these rods aren’t reinforcing a small door…they’re responsible for the integrity of the entire eight-foot wall. There’s no tie down on the wall either because there is no hub. So, if you have the misfortune of the wind changing to blow on the wall with the door after you’ve set it up, you’ll at best have to listen to wall flapping in the wind all day and at worst fight not to have it blow in. Without any grommets in the snow skirt and only one internally along this wall, you couldn’t pay me to overnight in this tent as delivered.
One nice feature with Clam’s poles compared to the other two though is that they are permanently attached to the shelter, velcroing out of the way for storage so you don’t have to worry about fishing for them in the bottom of the bag or losing them. And you will need these poles installed all the time. It won’t be an option like the door support poles for Eskimo and Otter...the wall will simply flop down without the poles installed. The attachment of the poles to the hub does seem underbuilt and prone to failure to me, given that we’ll open and close these things in -40*C up here. But that’s probably just a good opportunity to mention that Clam has a 3 year warranty where Eskimo and Otter both have a single year.
One last note on the D-doors on these tents. Clam and Otter have a door that comes to point and closed by zipping an upper and lower zipper towards the hub in the middle of the wall. The Eskimo has a radiused D-door that can be closed with a single pull of a zipper around the door, or by bringing the top and bottom zipper together anywhere along its length. It sounds like Eskimo has a winner here. Unfortunately, the fabric tends to easily become too tight on the Eskimo making it harder to close. This can happen on the other two as well but is much more of a problem with Eskimo’s design. The pictures below are the X-400, Outbreak 450XD, and Vortex Pro Lodge.
This is a hard category to score. On the one hand, the Clam has the best door by a country mile. On the other hand, the door may have irreparably harmed the integrity to the entire hub. In the end I decided to just score the doors on their merits as actual doors...the Clam's design will cost it points in several other categories.
Clam X-400 vs Eskimo Outbreak 450XD vs Otter Vortex Pro Lodge vs Otter Vortex Pro Cabin
Hybrid Mode
