They are using brushless motors and interesting gimble assembly to provide this interesting blend between RC flight and the beauty of single line kites..

More here PremierRc.com

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

Day one started with everyone cutting the fabric and sewing the main sail together. The rest of the day and most of day 2 was spent on applique. A lot of great unique designs and approaches came out of this process. The latter part of day 2 was spent adding reinforcements, pockets, and framing.

By Saturday morning we had almost all the kites in the air at Beinn Bhreagh. The winds proved a bit too much for us so we decided to pack it in and head up to the “Kite House” for a great spread of meats, cheeses, salads and sweets. Thanks to Jeanne and Hugh Muller for hosting us, it was great way to cap off an excellent few days in Baddeck.

Special thanks to Scott Ferguson for stepping in as an instructor, your help was greatly appreciated! A big thank you to Sharon Morrow for organizing and hosting this event, and of course thanks to Anne Morrell, fabric artist extraordinaire and my partner in this workshop! Hopefully we will put on another workshop next year.

I posted a ton of pictures on Flickr including pics of all of the finished kites flying…

In celebration of Canada’s centennial of flight, this once in 100 years 2 day kite-making workshop is being offered to a limited number of participants on a first come, first served basis. Kite-maker Bill Wilson and fabric artist Anne Morrell will guide this workshop providing the inspiration and expertise required for each participant to design and construct a Rokkaku kite. Rokkaku kites originated in Japan. These 6-sided kites are taller than they are wide and known for their flying ability.

Kite kit included but participants must bring their own basic sewing supplies and sewing machine capable of doing zigzag. Registration Fee: $75.00 A cheque in the amount of $75.00 must accompany your completed registration form (form on opposite side). Supply list to accompany registration confirmation.

Download the brochure and registration form here:
Silver Dart – Rokkaku Workshop registration form

Cheers,
Bill

Saint Honore was fantastic! The people are wonderful and put up with my non existent french skills. Friday was fantastic with near perfect winds. Saturday brought strong winds up to 50 km/h, but that didn’t stop AWITA from flying (and ripping) their PL giant inflatables. Sunday was light wind but was flyable almost all day!

This picture was taken on the road to the B&B we stayed at, a wonderful view of the airport where we were flying. I have never flown kites at a working airport before… we even had a visit from a CF-18, that was pretty incredible. I will post more pictures later, right now we are on the ferry between St. Simeon(sp?) and Riviere-du-loop.

Kite Surfing and Buggying on Conrad Beach – Nova Scotia, Canada – Watch the best video clips here

Dave and Izaak helping with launch…

Bridle adjustments…

You can check out more at Juan’s blog. solocometas.blogspot.com

While I was writing the instructions for the workshop I was playing around with Google Sketch Up. Mainly to see if I could create a simple rendering of the fled for use as a colorizer. I ended up going a bit overboard as usual, and while I am no Sketch Up expert I thought this was pretty cool. (I am just impressed that I could build the drogue LOL).

Here is the week one write up (registration with the forum may be required)

Looks like the International Kite Festival held in India this past weekend was a big success. Over 31 Countries represented.

Check out the deshgujarat.com for some great photos and some more links to past events.

Even some great shots of good friend Cliff Quinn with his amazing double start facet kite.

Lot’s of great pictures on flickr, try searching for Ahmedabad Kite Festival. That search turned up the picture in this post which is from one of my favorite photographers on Flickr.

Managed to get out at lunch today to get a few pictures of my newly constructed Fled MK III. I am working with Steve Ferrel from the kitebuilder.com forums to put together an online Fled kite building workshop.

This kite is scaled up from the original slightly to more easily handle the 32.5 inch spars that I use. I chose white as I will be primarily using this as a kite for Kite Aerial Photography. It should make a nice, hopefully not so distracting, platform for taking photos.

Thanks to Brooks Leffler for putting the plans together…

KiteFenzy.com pic of a custom kite for Dwarf8

This is a really cool series of photos showing what it takes to build a custom kite-surfing kite.

Here is an example from a fantastic natural refresher drink called Dwarf8, http://www.dwarf8.com/ from Switzerland but based in the kite mecca of Europe, Tarifa, where best to have a custom kite? They ordered an 11m Sport 2 in all white sail with the logo sewn on.

Saw this photo on Flickr, it’s painted on a wall in New Orleans. Speaks for itself..

Not quite a tent, but it’s Nylon with a fiberglass frame… and it flys.

Apparently a tent took off in a brief gust and hit some power lines causing an outage at the Maker Faire.

See the whole story on the Make Blog

Fellow KAPper Rob Huntley from Ottawa and I spent Sunday KAPping around the Halifax area. We had good sessions at Fisherman’s Cove in Eastern Passage, NS and Peggy’s Cove. The wind was light at the dock’s but it quite happily lifted my 6 ft Rok with my 1+ pound rig. The winds at Peggy’s Cove were perfect, probably around 15 km/h, and off shore.

This is one of the shots fomr Fisherman’s Cove, it’s the picnic tables, and baord walk at Boondock’s restaurant.

There are more on my photo stream at Flickr, and of course you can see more KAP photos on the Flickr Kite Aerial Photography group.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/us-navy-first-kite-power-ship.php

Basically it saves them a huge amount of money by reducing fuel consumption. Although not the primary motivator, the fact that the ship uses innovations to reduce costs was a factor in the Military’s decision. Cuts costs, it’s better for our enviornment, and it has a huge ass kite! What more could you want.

See the complete press release on Military.com
Cheers,
Bill

Ha I knew someone had proof. Looks like Doug Isherwood got a pic of me flying at the Buffalo train station.

Thanks Doug!

The festival, as usual, was a lot of fun. The wind was up and down on Saturday and Sunday so it made it difficult to keep anything in the air for longer than a few minutes. I managed to fly some smaller single line kites for a while and we did have the fish up for a good part of Sunday. Ted Gaudet of the Dieppe Kite club took delivery of his new mid size custom fish, we managed to get them hooked up to the same line on Sunday so we could see them flying at the same time. However both Ted and I were helping out with the “running of the bols” when they finally had enough wind to get into the air Looked good, even from 900 feet away

I did my first bit of indoor flying at the Saturday night event at the historic Buffalo train station. I was flying my Horvath Long Way Home, which has a wing span of about 2.7 meters (9ft or so), it was a lot of fun/work. I hope somebody ended up with some pictures so I can prove it

Had a great time hanging out with IQuad, these guys really shred the sky with their cool improvised routines. (check out the mega fly from Bristol in the post below). Picked up a couple of new kites this year, A master series Rev Bazzer’s Blue Flames, and a B Series Rev (Yellow). Had a brief chance to fly the the B-Series yesterday, now to practice practice practice

Many people have been posting their photos of this event so with the help of the TKF mailing list and a few other sources here are some photo links.

Carlos Simoes
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/567653426EvpWVm

Christine & Daniel
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57989237@N00/

Doug Isherwood
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougish1954/sets/72157607869271509/

Ted Shaw
http://community.webshots.com/user/dancer2e?action=publicAlbums

Don Brownridge
http://community.webshots.com/user/etbco

MNKiteMan’s photos on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=niagara&w=84853337%40N00

Gary Maynard’s Photos on Flickr
(nothing tagged)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/windjammer/

Ralph Reed’s Photos on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rreed3/sets/72157607800953930/

Wayne has promised to upload a ton of photos from many of the flyers to the NiagaraKite.com website, as soon as they are up I will post a link here.

Cheers,
Bill