I didn’t get a chance to work on this kite last night, I had a repair job to do on a badly beaten HQ Tramontana.. what a night..

Anyhow on to the Bow Kite. Tonight I started to edge bind the horizontal discs that cross cut the kite every 40 cm or so. These disks are edge bound in such a way to create a sleeve for a 2mm carbon or fiberglass rod. The problem I ran into was that the discs #1 and #6 have such a narrow curve at the top that I was getting terrible puckers which resulted in a baggy sail when the rod was installed. I really wanted to use the Mil spec gorss grain I had purchased from Kitebuilder.com but it wasn’t going to cut it for this small of a radius.

I turned to a good discussion on the kitebuilder.com forums titled “curved top banner” (forum registration required) which outlined several methods for sewing these types of curves. I tried a number of the suggestions but settled on using 3/4″ strips 1.5 oz fabric (ripstop) cut on the bias. This worked really really well, I have to say I never realised how well it actually worked until this evening, I have sewn curves before but never this tight. In this case I think the only thing that would work is fabric cut on the bias. Chalk it up as a learning experience and move on…

So after all that experimentation I only managed to get two of the discs sewn… Tada…

 

  

©2006

  

©2004

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 12:44 am and is filed under Bow Kite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.