Re: high wind kites
| Subject | Re: high wind kites |
| From | abw@cre.canon.co.uk (Andy Wardley) |
| Date | Fri, 10 Oct 1997 08:49:21 GMT |
| Newsgroups | rec.kites |
Larry Benitez <lbenitez@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> I've often wondered if anyone has built a "fully" vented kite.
> Meaning that the whole kite is made of vented material. In an earlier
> post by someone (Chris or Andy I think), mentioned that vents in the
> kites center of pressure (probably the wrong terminology) would make
> the kite not fly.
That's right, but it's not always a bad thing. Venting around the aerodynamic centre of pressure means that the kite looses all drive. This is generally bad, but I did have a lot of fun with a Box of Tricks that I vented in this way (there a picture on my web site somewhere...um.. here it is: http://www.kfs.org/~abw/kite/gallery.html). The kite tended to hang in impossibly long stalls and made for some fun trickery. Not good for competition, but great for messing about with in high winds.
Tim Benson "vented" a Box of Tricks a few years back by peppering the entire skin with holes, burned in with a soldering iron. The kite looked like one of those shirts basketball players wear. It flew pretty well, adding a good 5mph+ to the upper wind range and it handled pretty much like a normal Box would in lower wind. The problem was it took hours to burn the thouands of holes in the skin.
Laser cutting, maybe.....
A fully vented kite should be fun, but I imagine you would need a very strong wind for it.
A
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