Revolution Forum: kwmf - Viewing Profile

I realise I'm likely to be told not to bother and fly it until it wears out .... but I'm going to ask the question regardless.

If I fly on the beach until the sun starts to set (or well after it sets) the weather conditions here are always such that you get condensation on the spars which then gets sand sticking to the verticals. This essentially creates a sandpaper (sand-carbon) rod and wears a nice white stripe on the sail along the contact area. This occurs on both the standard sail and the vented sails, but is slightly less pronounced on the vented.

I have both Tedlar and Insignia tape and I'm wondering if there are any pros/cons to using either as stick on wear strips?

As a simple test last night I stuck a patch of each to a thin wooden board last night and then hit them with some rough sandpaper to see how each holds up. The sandpaper was very coarse and the tedlar just got shredded in 3 passes. The Insignia just shrugged it off repeatedly until it started to fuzz up and begin to wear through slowly. Now granted the grit and pressure was way higher than what would likely occur on the beach, but the insignia tape seemed WAY more resistant to wear than the Tedlar tape.

Assuming that this mod WILL be done to my beach kites, what suggestions/advice do you lot have?

Any reasons to consider NOT doing this?

I spotted the new iQuad offices while driving around near where I work.

I was hoping it was a secret R&D facility far away from the prying eyes of the American market, but they seemed confused when I started talking about sails, frames, icarex, carbon, bursts and grids

Was worth asking though

Well the damn mutant beat me to my idea of chest mounting my GoPro when it arrived so I decided to test filming from the headlamp mounting...

The sun and wind were badly aligned but I was determined to test the concept anyway, even if the sun is in frame most of the time
I tried to fly off on the left third of the window, but with only 30' of line it was a tad bit impossible to keep the sun out of the recording frame. I cut the sound and reduced the size from full 1080p HD down to this just to get it up to youtube and see how it came out.

No routine here, just a lot of dive stops to see how the speed is handled by the Go Pro as well as some slower moves. The main thing I wanted to test was speed and catches.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=U9AYf8O6hFA

The more I fly this machine the more I like it !!!!

It's certainly not a team kite (well, not in my hands) since the 1.5 platform has a softer suspension (thanks to the frame bending more) and has a turn rate thats more easily controlled .... but for exciting solo flying this thing just can't be beat.

The other thing I really love about my B2 is that I don't have to worry about which sail/frame combo to use so much because of the massive range this thing can handle. I pretty much fly the full sail with the 3-wrap frame (even in super low wind) and the full vent on whichever frame was in there when I unrolled it unless the wind is going really crazy and I want the 4 wrap for safety. So far I've only flown my B2 on 90# line since whatever sail I put up theres not enough pull to threaten the line. The wind range for each sail is so huge, that you don't really have to worry about gusts unless you were flying at the limit already, in which case you had the wrong sail to begin with.

For solo flying all one really needs is a full sail and full vent B2 with 90# line in 30' and 50' lengths and you've got everything covered from next to nothing to monster wind. If there were Pros available I'd drop money on a full set right now before I got myself a 1.5 Pro set.

For me flying solo 99.9% of the time right now, this is my favourite platform to fly by far.