MBK Diamond Kite Stories

Featuring Sticked MBK Diamonds

The largest MBK diamond kite needs to have the vertical spar slipped into place and secured before flying. The smaller Skewer Series designs are ready to go, with no setup at all, apart from attaching the flying line.

On this site, there's more kite-making info than you can poke a stick at :-) Want to know the most convenient way of using it all?

The Big MBK E-book Bundle is a collection of downloads—printable PDF files which provide step-by-step instructions for many kites large and small.

That's every kite in every MBK series.

This classic class of kite can be a touch tricky to hand launch since it is not fully stable until the tail is floating free of the ground. But once up, they are good reliable flyers.

The Dowel Diamond is a variation that does not require a tail, so it's a bit easier to launch.

Here's a short-format flight report featuring the 1.2 m (4 ft.) Dowel Series kite:

Light-Air Antics

With the power out for a few hours, it seemed a good idea to walk down to the local reserve with Aren. Not without a kite of course! There was just over an hour of sunlight left in the day, and leaves were barely moving. But that's just how the Dowel Diamond kite likes it.

It turned out to be quite an interesting outing with the pale-orange Eddy-inspired MBK Diamond kite.

A few tows were necessary to contact perhaps the 3 kph necessary to stay up there. It was very marginal indeed, with the kite sometimes losing height on its face or in the gentlest possible tailslides, before edging upward again.

The original Dowel Diamond

In point form, here are a few highlights:

The kite was holding altitude at around 150 feet, but pulling so lightly that the 25 cm (10 in.) wooden winder could just be left on the grass! Later, I put the kite bag on it, just in case. I could have used the 20-pound line, rather than the 50-pound one it was on.
Flying face-down in the weakest of thermal air, the kite was holding height with the flying line draped almost vertically down to where several meters of it just lay in the grass!
I took my eyes off it for half a minute or so while winding it back in. At a very high line angle, it managed to get itself into a vertical dive before I noticed. The diamond just curved round in a large languid loop before righting itself, well above the treetops. Whew.
With the line length back to around 10 meters (30 feet), I had fun dancing the kite just out of reach of Aren. He tried pelting it with a bark chip and eventually succeeded in getting the chip stuck in the bottom corner pocket of the sail — not once, but twice.
I checked the wind meter after half an hour or so of flying. There had been a peak gust-strength of 4.1 kph (batten down the hatches) and an average wind speed of ... 0.0 ... no mistake, 0.0 kph! Most of the time the cups weren't moving at all. This was near ground level of course, but I think that 0.0 reading is a first.

Tim's Blog Posts
Featuring MBK Diamond Kites

Since these are short-format reports, they are grouped together. The page links are in descending order of kite size:

MBK Diamond Kite Posts—Multi-Dowel

MBK Diamond Kite Posts—Dowel

MBK Diamond Kite Posts—Skewer

Tim's Flight Reports
Featuring MBK Diamond Kites

The links below are full-length reports recorded by me, each featuring an MBK diamond kite of one type or another:

Most Unwilling to Come Down! (Multi-Dowel)

Long Climbs in Light Warm Breezes (Dowel)

Flies Like a Dream—If Thermals not too Extreme! (Dowel)

When Is a Hole in the Sail a Good Thing? (2-Skewer)

On a Taut 70 Meters Under a Leaden Sky (2-Skewer)

Two Orange Diamonds Flash in a Blue-Gray Setting (1-Skewer)

High Up in a Gusty Fresh Breeze (Tiny Tots)

The story or stories above document actual flying experiences. My write-ups are definitely "warts and all" since things don't always go totally as planned. However, half the fun of kiting is anticipating the perfect flight. When it happens, it's magic!

As mentioned earlier, there's more kite-making info here than you can poke a stick at :-)

Want to know the most convenient way of using it all?