Just had a wicked storm pass through which got me thinking about what tarp/tent materials will not stand up to hail very well. Even though I imagine it would have been shredded, I wished I had my tarp up to see how it would have done. So what's the worst hail you've experienced in your shelter and have you ever had one fail?

I experienced about a half-hours worth of heavy, grape-sized hail in my SMD Luna Solo. It held up just fine.

I spent a couple hours in my Tarptent Cloudburst in heavy pea size hail in the Sierras a few years back. No problems.

15 years ago in the BWCAW. Raining ice water mixed with golfball sized hail. Outcome: Five holes punched through the PU coated tent fly. Not sure of the fabric weight but 1.9oz/yd before coating was typical at the time.

Nylon repair tape to the rescue!

I've since had smaller hail (more or less 1/4" diameter) leave a silnylon MYOG tarptent undamaged.

We had marble size hail and high winds during a car camping trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This was a basic Eureka 4-man tent with fiberglass poles. It held up fine, but the neighbors tent was completely collapsed.

Dime Size hail in a Golite SL2...Held up like a champ. I am pretty sure this shelter is as close to bombproof as they get.

I was in the Alpine National Park in Victoria last year and had hail storms on three consecutive evenings. My Tarptent Moment came through them all with no damage at all. The second storm was very severe with hail stones the size of marbles (~10mm diameter) and lasted for about 10 minutes. The ground was completely covered in hail afterwards.

Andrew, I also have a TT Moment and I'm glad to hear it held up well in the hailstorms.

BTW, I've coated the top 1/2 of my Moment's canopy with a thin (5:1) coating of odorless mineral spirits & silicone just to preclude any "mist-thru" in a driving rain.

Remember, silnylon is what parachutes are made of.
If people are jumping out of planes with it, I think I could rely on it in almost all weather.

Likewise spinnaker and cuben was originally designed for racing yacht sails and they get a lot of abuse.

If you want a shelter that could hold up to tornadoes, hurricanes, golfball sized hail, ..., you wouldn't want to carry it, well at least I wouldn't:-)

In those applications they wouldn't experience abuse like hail. I was mainly curoius, especially if someone had experienced a fabric failure of some kind. Not having personally seen spinnaker or cuben, I had nothing to base a guess upon for those. Since cuben uses mylar layers I believe, it would be most suspect though I'd guess the spectra is tight enough density to prevent the catastrophic failure that plain mylar would have. I thought I remember a post where someone stuck a nail through it with no loss of structure. Anyway, I use low-density polyethylene for my tarp, and it would deform to a point and then finally puncture as hail size increased. I don't know what that point is though. My test was just chucking various sized rocks at a piece pulled taut. I know a quarter-sized one penetrated which may translate to golfball-sized hail. Tornadoes and hurricanes aren't too common in the mountains, but hailstorms are it seems.

I don't know details, but I do know that silnylon, spinnaker and cuben is far more durable than the standard poly tarp material.

I also know that people thru-hike the CDT, PCT, AT, ... with shelters made out of these materials and I know they can get hit with some pretty extreme/scary weather sometimes.

I have experienced a big branch blowing/falling into a silicone nylon shelter in a gale. It was probably something as bad or worse than your worst hail storm.

It broke a pole, but the silnylon didn't rip.

My observations aren't scientific though and others may have more findings.