Kite Making - The Airbra part 3

The First Test Flights

AirbraNow the kite was finished it needed a test flight - when the day arrived I (with a certain amount of trepidation) assembled it on the local flying field, attached the flying lines.. and launched.... and it flew! And actually it flew rather well for a first attempt - in that in forward & backward flight it was fine (which was to be expected since the kite is asymmetrical). The dive-stop worked well and had quite good accuracy. But.....

... There was no way to do any of the more fancy things I thought the kite would be capable of - for instance flipping it onto it's front or back (in the same manner as the Synergy Deca), Also spins were a bit, well, strange, and it seemed to need quite a lot of wind. Sideways slides, either horizontally or vertically, didn't work well at all (there was a tendency for the Airbra to kind of flip end over end (or something) - then fall out of the sky (resulting in a walk of shame).

But the worst problem was that when I pulled hard on the lines the stand offs on the back of the kite pulled themselves out of the connectors I had made - which (apart from the risk of a punctured sail) made the vertical 4mm spars kind of deform themselves.

All in all it needed some rethinking.

The Modifications

Back at home I tacked the issue of the stand offs popping out. To combat this I remade all 4 of them, but this time made them about 5cm longer (so that about 5cm of the standoff would be encased in the connector).

Next was the bridle - I thought that the problem with the lack of radical slack line tricks was due to the bridle not being long enough - near the verticals. I redid the whole thing in order to allow (or so my thinking went) more movement near the top and bottom. So when I pull on the top lines I can actually tip the kite towards me and it would float face down.

Whilst I was in a 'fix it' mood I decided to replace the vertical plastic end caps (which of course stuck out beyond the edge of the kite) with sewn pockets on the edge of the sail to try and prevent line wraps around the end caps when doing the slack line tricks. I sewed a dacron pocket on one side and a vecro flap on the other to allow the spar to be removed. This was a pain in the neck, but eventually I managed it. But I then had to work out a new way of attaching the bridle lines, since before they were attached to the end caps). A few minutes with the soldering iron to make some holes to thread the line trough sorted this!

The Disaster!

To test out the various modifications I took the Airbra out one very windy Saturday morning. Actually it was very very windy and very gusty. I should, it must be said, have known better. I decided to fly the Airbra - I set it up, launched it, flew it for - oh 45 seconds - then watched it fall apart in mid flight. Landing/crashing it and checking it out it became apparent that one of the Revolution EXP spars had broken in flight (which to be fair these spars were slightly damaged near the ends from badly assembling the EXP soon after I got it), and it (or another) spar had punctured the sail near the centre.

I was not a happy bunny!

I took the mangled mess home in something of a temper (mainly because I knew I shouldn't have flown it in those wind conditions) and threw it in the corner where it stayed for a couple of weeks.

The End (?)

After a while I returned to the Airbra, and:

• patched the sail,
• purchased some new 4mm carbon,
• remade some of the broken stand off fittings (again!!!),
• dug out a spare EXP spar I had forgotten I had,
• replaced the bridle line attaching the horizontal end caps with bungee (just so there was a bit more 'give' in flight).

And now I class the Airbra as finished.

Does it get flown much? No - it's not one of my main kites (still the Revolution / Deca for me). But it does get flown from time to time and it is fun. It still isn't 'radical' enough (the verticals are too curved I think), but it's fun - and it is somewhere between the Revolution and Deca in feel. Is it like the real Airbow? It only vaguely looks like one in form (not surprisingly the build of a Airbow is somewhat better than the Airbra!), and I guess performance is only a shadow of the real thing (so no worries for Andy Wardley/Benson then!). And the stand off connectors aren't that strong so I keep having to make some more up when I break them....

I may even end up buying the real thing at some point in the future (but there again there might even be an Airbra Mark II.....).