contributed articles ...
the fat kid’s notebook - jeff macinnis
high wind spine shape
“oh no, not you again! ya’ gonna’ muck up another shovel full of hot gas n’ confuse us with all yer’ mr. bighead fighter kite wizardry?”
hope not. i’m just a guy that made a few good kites and got lucky in a couple of pretty big kite fights. i had a lot of “want to” in one fight i was in. spent over and hour fine tuning the kite. good thing too because the wind was blowing like hell. oh yeah — the kite i used was the same design i flew on new years ’98 in san diego. pretty much a 5 to 8 machine. definitely the wrong choice but it was all i had left come game day. sixteen to twenty knots and just cold enough to be uncomfortable. the yaw attitude stays the same. dead solid centered. the pitch attitude and spine shape have more leeway in adjustment and directly influence each other. in big wind conditions you'll notice a lot of hyper kites in the air and heaps of uhh ... grounding. what i did was adjust the kite to slow down. just enough to allow reaction time. the spine/keel shape helped a lot here. the bend for big wind is a sharp, small radius curve just up from center. it had a slight nose bend also but the center bend came out kind of radical. a kink really. this wedge type bend seemed to deflect nearly as much air out the front of the kite as it did out the back. the kite positioned very near zenith in a hover. i could hold the line taught and get it to sway to either side by leaning my body. out on the sides close to the ground, the kite behaved well and instilled confidence in down wind sweeps. a sweep at any less than ten feet in altitude even at close distance is a suicide mission. on the sides i could swing it down to four or five feet.
guess it was enough. at the end of the day i came out with two more points than my closest competitor. ‘thanks’ for the lesson guys and thank you johnny hsiung for showing me the spine bend.
alright your fatness, but is there a happy medium spine shape between the san diego adjust and the big wind adjust? most likley. check it out and tell me what you find.
the fat kid’s notebook - jeff macinnis
oh and maybe a deal in there about how ya’ ain’t spozed’ to copy, distribute, disseminate or sell the stuff with out permission of the author/authors – jeff
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