Morning gentlemen,
How’s that knee, Ryan?
I thought you might be interested in these single skin kites. Here’s some footage of a 4sqm single skin kite flying off a park bench at Thorneside. (Old news for you, Jay). It shows how quickly they “inflate” and that, at least in that light wind, on short slightly separated lines, it will stay up with no input. Both the quick inflation and relative stability on short lines are potentially quite important for launching from a boat.
Another attraction I’ve hoped for from the SS is ability to reef. I tried that yesterday at Wellington Point. I put eyelets in each of 5 of the ribs at 4 points across the chord and tied draw strings through them. As you see from the video, the reefed kite is quite controllable. The objective here is not to reef a kite for stronger wind, but to allow more sedate launching of big kites while reefed. Although this little one flew quite controllably, it was much less stable than without the reef – but it worked well enough to warrant further investigation. I should have tried it on short lines – ie very short launching lines. Need to think about a mechanism to evenly undo the reef.
Bench testing the linear actuator for the controller later this morning. The motor delivers about 80W to the lead screw. With a 1mm pitch at 6,000rpm that’s 100mm per second - so a force of 800N….should manage to break something!
Sailing this afternoon. Sailing Fun Hunter in about 10 knots and sunny 28C with a crew of 10 family and friends and probably a fair bit of champagne (though not for the skipper!)…how lucky am I!?!?
Trev