During our first time in Scotland we encountered midges; the famous tiny insects that can make your camping miserable. At first they seem rather harmless but it didn’t take long for the midges to make us move to another spot. It was obvious we would have to make the California midge-proof for any future trips to either Scotland or Scandinavia.

There’s good midge screens for sale, but 50 pounds seemed excessive and I love a DIY-job. So I decedid to midge-proof the van myself. First I considered 3D-printing the frames but there weren’t any good models available. After that I thought about cutting the frames myself out of ABS sheeting and adding midge netting in between. But that turned out to be quite a job. In the end I went for a very low-tech but easy solution. Sticking midge netting to the existing insect screens.

Wat do you need?

Material:

  • Midge netting
  • Double sided tape

Tools:

  • Scissors
  • Lighter
  • Ruler
  • Hobby knife

Howto?

Cut the midge netting to the approcimate size of the existing screens. Cut 4 pieces of double sided tape at the right length and place them on the inside of the screen (on the plastic frame). Then stick the netting to the tape en press it well so that it sticks. Make sure you pull teh netting straight but not to hard to avoid getting to much tension on the fabric. The next step is to use the ruler and the hobby knife to cut the netting along the edge of the tape. To remove the annoying and ugly strands of fiber that remain, move the lighter across the edges. The heat will shrink the fibres and make for a nice and neat result.

In this photo the netting is already placed on the tape.

On the inside you hardly notice the difference. I used whte tape because I had some lying around. If you use transparant tape, you wont notice anything at all.

From the outside there really isn’t anything to see. The frames of the screens have become a bit thicker due to adding the tape, but it fits fine. In fact, in our case it fits better now then before.

Tesa double sided tape.

Important!

Don’t forget to also address the ventilation holes in the pop-top’s fabric! Otherwise midges will still get into the van. I’ll might post again soon about how I fixxed that.