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Wierd ideas

Some odd ideas sane kiters wouldn't normally bother with
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Braking & Venting

When I made my Wacko I used an unusual seam from the nose to standoff, with the sail on the frame one way it sits out of the way, if I turn the sail inside out (ie: put the frame on the other side these seams form a spoiler on the ridge from nose to standoff, ie: on the apex of the aerofoil discussed above. Presumably it creates enough turbulence to mess up the aerofoil effect because it reduced pull & speed. Weird eh?

For my next experiment I made some long spoilers (like a fuzzy tail) to attach to the back of kites. Well I've tried them on my Wacko and Psycho and the results were quite encouraging. The kites handling wasn't too degraded and the kites were more useable at the top end of their wind range. In other words if a kite is OK to say 20mph but pulls hard above 10, it would exhibit less pull at say 15mph. By the time you exceed 20mph though, they become overwhelmed

Variable Sail Shapes

I'm toying with the idea of an active sail. Suppose I use a four standoff layout like the Tramontana. Next I could put winglets on it which will increase washout at the tips mid window. Now suppose that the inner standoffs (next to the deep V shaped keel) were suitably springy - with battons down the keel sides, _and_ if the tip twist could be transferred via the trailing edge to the keel: mid window the tips would twist out, so the keel would widen, and hence the whole leading edge would twist. Since the keel is a 'draggy' surface this should help slow the kite mid-window. I suspect this may be how the 'active keel' on the Aerodrone Stripes works (I've only seen photos). Further to this an airbrake could be arranged in the back of the V shaped keel such that when the keel is deep and narrow (low wind) the airbrake folds down, but when it spreads out it would pull the airbrake up.

I recently flew an AirCrafts Sidekick which uses a similar idea (though without the folding airbrake. It has a bungee between the two sail halves rather than standoffs near the spine. It was a strange sensation to feel the sail change shape, particularly when pumping the kite


kitedesign/weird.html last modified 19:57:11 30-Jul-2017

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