Tue Jul 15 09:30:36 PDT 2003
Interesting weekend. I built a Delta-Conye (box/delta hybrid) kite this weekend. Building it wasn’t really that hard. Got some great instructions on KiteMongers
It actually was pretty fun and easy to put together. I had a lot of "help" from the cats while trying to work. I even got out the camera to try and dissuade them from helping me quite so much, but thye just kept on playing and making a mess of things. But I got some fun photos of them as well as some good photos of the kite in various stages of construction:
Ran into a couple of problems when flying it:
First, the 1/4 inch wooden dowels aren’t sufficient for the cross spar in moderate wind. My first flight in the field by our house was going great, the kite was about 400ft and when I stopped it from going out further the high wind snapped the backspar. It then dropped moderatly quickly. I pulled it in as quickly as possible which probably kept it out of the powerlines, but I ended up with the kiteline over a corner of brush, trees and blackberry bushes. After finally retreiveing the kite and spending a lot of time that evening rewinding the kiteline. I found that we do have one kite store in Portland,
Paint The Sky Kites
828 NW 23rd Ave
Portland, OR 97210
503 222 5096
Unfortunately they don’t seem to be much of a kite-building shop, but they do have spars and such to repair the stunt kites they sell, so I got 3 0.20×48 fiberglass rods (all they had) for $1.85 a piece, so I bought all 3 that they had, which turned out to be a good thing.
Upon returning the sewing machine we cut the fiberglass rod to 36′ and got the kite up again, but crashed it into a lightpost and snapped the delta wing spar. So we pulled the wing spars out and replaced them both with the two remaining fiberglass spars.
Next flight we landed it on it’s side and shoved the spar through the pocket since I just used the ripstop nylon for the spar pockets instead of cordua or something stronger. So after sewing denim flaps to reenforce them and sanding the corners of the spar edges, back up it went again, and while it landed on the roof, it worked fine, but the wind just wasn’t consistent enough to keep it up enough for KAP.
In other news, Prismiq has released a "preview release" of their Linux server, so I’ve ordered one with a keyboard to start playing around with it. Laurie isn’t happy with the user interface on the Rio, so at a minimum it should be a decent Rio replacement. If things go well and I can get it working as a full DVR solution with either MythTV or freevo, I’ll buy one for upstairs (I even have a spare wireless card that should work).
I’ve really been enjoying the SciFi Stargate reruns on Mondays. There’s some really great comedy in some of them.