Kite Making - The Black Deca part 3

Rebuilding the Black Deca

I have been meaning to write this for about the last year or so (at least the To Do item has been on my Palm device for that long). At last here is the conclusion to the Black Deca story......

After the first test flight and looking at the kite back home I decided the problems were:

• Sail far too baggy (real Deca's have a very tight sail) and
• The spars, especially the bow spar, were too flimsy.

The Sail

Opening the seamsSo what to do - I decided to open up the seams (I had made it from 5 pieces of fabric, but still making a flat sail) and try and 'shape' the pieces so they made a more 3D shape (in effect more Deca 6 like).

This involved unpicking all the seams in the kite (a very long job!), working out what needed cutting - which was done by eye - and cutting the fabric. Then of course sewing it all back up again afterwards. The marking/cutting was particularly hard given I was guessing on how much to remove in order to improve the kite shape.

The Spars

I had originally gone for 4mm carbon spars throughout the Black Deca to keep the weight down (I had wanted a light wind kite after all).

Looking at kite it appeared I could retain the 4mm spars in the wingtips and the verticals (there doesn't appear to be much strain on those), but replacing the bow for something a little bit more robust. After speaking to Dave from FiveForty I decided to go for 5.5mm carbon and see how we got on.

Replacing the old 4mm stuff turned out to be quite easy since the home made end caps would accommodate the larger diameter carbon without any problem.

The Result

Once finished it was again test flown - and, to be honest, was rather under whelming. Yes it flies - and in some ways pretty well but there are still a number of problems:

• Still a saggy-sailed kite
• Doesn't fly in low winds (the whole purpose of building it).
• And when it does fly it doesn't do the Deca like things like flipping onto it's front and back.

So what's next with the Black Deca? I have flown it a few times, but to be frank it's not the most fun thing to fly. Every time I do fly it I wonder if it could be improved in some way. One of the things that irritates me is that the fabric is quite crumpled so one rainy day I intend to iron it all flat. Which requires the edge seams to be opened and re-sewn afterwards. And if I do that I might as well correct anything else that is wrong! Oh well.....

Links

• Black Deca Info