Indoor Kite Posts—Sled

MBK Indoor Sled
—outdoors in very light wind!

Later in the evening, at home, the drizzle finally ceased. Looking at the dampness outside, there seemed to be hardly any breeze. Naturally, thoughts turned to flying an Indoor Series kite! From experience so far, I'm predicting that only the Indoor Sled will tolerate outside flying. That is, unless there is a genuine total calm.

Only the sled shares its shape-holding strength between the spars and the sail material itself. Flat, bowed, or dihedral designs rely totally on the spars to hold shape. For simplicity, my diamond has a single attachment point for the flying line. As do all the other designs in the Indoor Series. So, the kites are vulnerable to overspeed. This is not a problem when you're just walking around indoors of course.

With 3 meters of thread attached, I was about to go out, when, on a whim, I attached a thread winder. Sure enough, the little sled was able to float way up now and again, in the very light and occasionally gusty breeze through our yard.

Flying required a gentle touch and even then rough patches would sometimes collapse the kite. A little jiggling would usually reinflate the sail and up the kite would float again. Turbulent air would even pop the kite vertically overhead. I'm sure there was no thermal effect at all; it was just random movements of the air mass which would accelerate the ultralight kite this way and that. Being very close to the inclines of our house roof, some of those swirls of air might have been quite large.

Working hard to stay inside the tiny wind range, I managed to get the clear-plastic sled up to around maximum roof height. There was also a brief foray over the neighbor's fence and tall bushes. All in all, it was a pleasant line-working experience at the very lightest end of the scale :-)