Kites in chronological order after design year, from 1994 and onwards. 

The kites are grouped in sections of eight.

On smartphone: use finger for scrolling sideways to be able to see all pictures.

–

Details of kites # 33 – 40.

Click  the picture to get a larger picture.

Click the button under the picture to get more information.

Kite NamePicturePicture
Picture
33. HumbleBee


HumbleBee 		HumbleBee 2020


HumbleBee 2020
HumbleBee 2020


Fluttering wings
34. Nyoman Shimmy


Nyoman 		Nyoman Shimmy


Nyoman Shimmy 		Nyoman Shimmy


Nyoman Shimmy - the movie
35. Roebuck


Roebuck 		Roebuck III


Roebuck III 		Roebuck IV


Roebuck IV
36. Ronbus


Ronbus 		Ronbus


Ronbus light
37. Svein


Svein 		Svein
38. akka


akka 		akka (c)


akka 		akka (e)


akka - the flight
39. Niëlje


From SHARK IV to Niëlje 		Niëlje


Niëlje 		Niëlje experiments


Niëlje development 		Niëlje - the result


Niëlje 2020
40. Forty³


Forty³ 		Forty³


Forty³

The rest of the kites.

Click  the button in left column the get the details of the kites in the section.

1. A-Kross


2. Fold Black


3. Who's flying whom?


4. Volvolare
View details of kites 1 - 85. Go fly a Kite, Charlie Brown!


6. Sverker Longship






7. Ruler of the Sky


8. SHARK
9. Salida Sled

10. Fly50

11. Flag

12. Sueño de Barrilete
View details of kites #9 - 1613. ReTurn

14. Confusion (Fat Flat Rok)

15. Red Tail

16. Sake Dako
17. Absolut Kite

18. Nokap

19. Flyn

20. WannaBees
View details of kites #17 - 2421. PentArch

22. Stockholm 1912

23. Coded & Decoded

24. Ikan & Sakana
25. Square Foot

26 BAHCO 10

27. Don't Waste Your Time

28. Money Laundry
View details of kites #25 - 3229. Imposters

30. Block Shot

31. YangTze

32. Butterfly
41. Ririn

42. ThorNado
View details of kites #41 - 48

An A-kross train is a single point tail free train with rectangular sails, usually in A3 size portrait. A thin twin tail is added to the top kite for visual effect.

Forty³ is a kite train based on the A-kross frame (see kite no 1 in the list) .

The train consists of 40 cells, each with the number 40 printed on it as well as the text ‘Congrats’ in 40 languages. 40 x 40 x 40.

It is made to fly at kite festivals that celebrate their 40th anniversary. In year 2020 that would be Satun, Cervia and Dieppe.

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Forty³ is a kite train based on the A-kross frame (see kite no 1 in the list) .

The train consists of 40 cells, each with the number 40 printed on it as well as the text ‘Congrats’ in 40 languages. 40 x 40 x 40.

It is made to fly at kite festivals that celebrate their 40th anniversary. In year 2020 that would be Satun, Cervia and Dieppe.

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

Forty³ is a kite train based on the A-kross frame (see kite no 1 in the list) .

The train consists of 40 cells, each with the number 40 printed on it as well as the text ‘Congrats’ in 40 languages. 40 x 40 x 40.

It is made to fly at kite festivals that celebrate their 40th anniversary. In year 2020 that would be Satun, Cervia and Dieppe.

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.

 

An A-kross train is a single point tail free train with rectangular sails, usually in A3 size portrait. A thin twin tail is added to the top kite for visual effect.

Forty³ is a kite train based on the A-kross frame (see kite no 1 in the list) .

The train consists of 40 cells, each with the number 40 printed on it as well as the text ‘Congrats’ in 40 languages. 40 x 40 x 40.

It is made to fly at kite festivals that celebrate their 40th anniversary. In year 2020 that would be Satun, Cervia and Dieppe.

Well, it took more than the four kites in the blue series to reach the end result. With just a minor measuring error in the first kite of the orange series it required a second orange version. But there it is. Date stamp 2 February 2020.

The plan is available here

Experiments with Niëlje

Many experiments were made to get rid of the wobbling in zenith and also to make the balance tuning more easy:

  • Longer primary bridles
  • Increased kick-up angle
  • Larger Wipe angle
  • Adding one more keel (to two)
  • Changing length and width of keels

Hopefully #4 in the blue series will be the one that works!

Here is #1 in the blue series, with the second keel added.

For next version I had made three simplifications from the previous version: one that would not have any impact on the flying ability, one that might have an impact and one that probably would have an impact. It didn’t fly.

So I reverted the third simplification and in a perfectly smooth breeze of 3 m/s I got the kite flying quite nicely. But it had a problem: When it reaches zenith it started to wobble and fell to one side.

Still, it was promising so it was time to give it a proper name instead of the generic SHARK IV. I gave it the name Niëlje, which is South Sami for “Four”.

 

 

SHARK IV, see no. 8 in this table, was a kite I built in the late 90’s (or possibly early 00’s) but never managed to get properly airborne until 2017. It was based on the special wing shape which I call Wipe and which gives an in-sail dihedral, but I had not made any drawing for that so I feared I could not re-create it.

By luck, as I was re-arranging the storage and opened an old suitcase I found a lot of board templates there, among them the two most important templates for the SHARK IV. (This proves that one should never throw anything away!)

I had made the SHARK IV in a quite complicated and overworked way so I wanted to make a new version with some simplifications (e.g. I reduced the number of keels from 3 to 1), and I also wanted it to be a light wind kite so I used some Icarex I had in stock and decided the width to be exactly four Skyshark tubes.

This version fly quite well, also in un-even winds. But it was not a light wind kite: It needed minimum 2 – 3 m/s.

akka (e) – will get 3D printed connectors very soon

The flight of akka (c) was quite good, but still needed tuning. For the next edition I had the workshop drilling again, but the accuracy was less this time so I needed an alternative.

Fortunately, good friend offered to make the necessary connectors in 3D print, and that is the current status.

Flight of akka (d)

 

Prototype 3 flew so well so I decided it was time to give a name. I gave the kite the name akka (with a lower case initial a not to disturb the balance) like the wild leader goose in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson.

What I had feared proved to be true: drilling straight through the carbon tube weakened the tube and made it inclined to break. By chance I had an aluminum tube that fitted exactly on Skyshark P300, so I cut that alu-tube in short pieces to use as reinforcement around the drilled holes.

After a full day’s search in Denpasar, Bali, I managed to find a workshop where they said they could drill those holes with the required accuracy.

Well, the accuracy turned out to not be 100%, but a considerable improvement compared to my drilling.

I made prototype 2 which was not too bad, but seemed to need changes to the body shape.

 

 

I had finished the first prototype late one evening: it was already dark, but there was a light breeze on my beach and I was anxious to see if this kite really could fly.

And it did! Not perfectly but well enough for me to tell me my thinking had not been all that bad.

Already in my second year of kite making I started to experiment with a single point wing. (I had this crush on single point and high aspect ratio quite early in my kite life). I had made one wing of IKEA bamboo and some porous material for garden use that did fly, but dived once in a while.

I had this idea of a self stabilizing wing, so I thought I knew how the wings should be made but I realized that I had not the skill to do that.

The sail ‘battens’ must be in fixed angles, both horizontally and sideways, and I thought that the only way to achieve this would be to drill through the spreader tube with a high precision. Which I knew I couldn’t do.

Furthermore I could not figure out how to make the centre section. Not until Henrik Fristrup Jensen showed me his wing kite in a hotel room in Beichuan, China, in March 2017.

Somehow I managed to find a drawing (on paper) of the wing shape I had in mind in 1993, worked with it a bit and started making the kite. I did the drilling that I thought I couldn’t do, and sure enough: the precision was not high!

Working ad hoc I made many mistakes and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I was doubtful that it would fly, but nevertheless I tested it and it actually flew! Not perfectly, but on a good angle and certainly well enough to prove that my original idea was correct. A good start for prototype 2.

 

Svein is a small version of the viking ship kite Sverker. The size is 70 x 70 cm and it is made of plastic and wooden sticks. It is intended to be a workshop kite for kids with a little bit of experience of making kites.

The plan for the workshop can be found here: Plan for Svein – currently in Swedish only

 

I wanted to see how much of a light-wind kite the Ronbus could be, so I checked my stock of Icarex: I had two colours that would suffice; grey and yellow.

With P90 Skyshark tubes this Ronbus is a real good light-wind kite!

My good friend Ron Spaulding is always flying a big white diamond kite when there is very little wind. Over time he makes improvements, and recently he changed to single point with a bent spine, but was not quite happy with the location of the towing point. I asked him if I could tweak the kite, and he kindly gave me the permission.

                                             Ron with his diamond kite

Ron had got the plan from Peter Rieleit years ago and already tweaked it a bit: Peter Rieleit night fly diamond 2010

I did the things I know work: kick-up front and in-sail dihedral. And it worked beautifully! A soaring kite for really light winds.

And since the geometric name of this shape of a diamond is Rhombus I gave my version the name Ronbus

(It could also be called Double Diamond.)

 

Encouraged by the big appreciation I added one more sail and got Roebuck IV.

With the two-sail ship kite looking good it was natural to add a third sail. At the beginning I was reluctant to introduce the opening at the bottom of each sail because I thought it would ruin the in-sail dihedral effect, but since it would be looking good I tested it anyway (it is a good habit to also test the bad ideas). It turned out that this venting actually was a stability improvement!

In the beginning I called this three-sail ship Taifun from a Swedish song by Evert Taube:

Vi mötte ett skepp I den svalkande monsun
Där vi ångade mot Röda havet opp
En fullriggare det var och dess namn var Taifun
Som nu segla från Ostindien till Good Hope

Later on, as I had made a ship kite with four sails, I resorted to call it Roebuck III, letting the Roman number indicate the number of sails.

The pirate Skull & Bone is optional.

At a kite festival in Redcliffe, Australia, I was flying a Sverker, my viking ship kite wearing a bandana. A spectator said: ” You look like a pirate; you should make a pirate ship”.

The next week I started to design it: it was actually only to add one sail to Sverker and change the shape of the sails a bit. I made a prototype in Nylon Paper, but the in-sail dihedral was not sufficient at the first try so I had to increase it by adding extra material.

I gave the kite the name Roebuck, since this was the name of the ship that was used by the Englishman William Dampier (“Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer and sometime Captain of the Ship ROEBUCK in the Royal Navy of King William the Third”) when he pirated in the seas in South East Asia and Oceania.

The train has a dancing movement in the air and a friend called the movement “shimmy”. There was a dance in in the 1920s that was called Shimmy; the dance was often considered to be obscene and was frequently banned from dance halls during the 1920s:

Check at YouTube: The Shimmy.  The video will open in a new tab.

Anyway,  I found this to be a good name for the train: Nyoman Shimmy.

However, there was one problem: The line kept getting cut, entirely by itself (or by the kite). Even a kevlar line would be cut!

It took quite a while before I got around to make a complete train: I had the ripstop but lacked material for spars.

A year and a half later I had what I needed: ripstop in five colors and the fiberglass rods.

However, when I cut out the ripstop I cut too much. I had planned to make 60 kites but had cut out for 80 so run short of fiberglass in the end.

With five colours and using different colour for top and bottom there would be 20 colour combinations. Now, a challenge was to organize the order of the kites on the train so the same colour did not appear in any two neighboring kites, not even when joining two segments of 20 kites.

The first Nyoman train, made of IKEA ripstop and bamboo.

On July 26, 2016 I had an old friend, actually my first Balinese friend, visiting me at Draknästet: pak Nyoman Adnyana whom I met already on my first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

In the evening, after he had left, I felt like having a go with a recent idea: A tail-free, single point diamond kite with a straight cross spar and that you can put in a train. To have it tail-free and with a straight cross spar (i.e. no bend or dihedral) implies there was a need for an in-sail dihedral.

The first attempt wouldn’t fly at all, but already the second design was very promising, and before I went to bed I had flown the first kite in complete darkness at a wind speed of 6 m/s. To honour my visitor earlier in the day I decided to call it Nyoman [Nee-oh-man].

The first Nyoman, #5 of the prototypes.

How to make the in-sail dihedral:

I kept testing and tuning to find the optimal sizes and balancing point, sometimes with help of neighbour kids.

In strong wind the wings flutter frenetically.

At wind speeds over 6 m/s (20 kmh, 13 mph, 11 knots) the wings start fluttering as the video above shows.

The 2016 version of HumbleBee was never completely finalized: there were some assembling flaws and maybe  also some design flaws. In April 2020 I revised the kite and made the necessary improvements and also prepared the plan on how to make it.

I think this kite started with the name, HumbleBee.

The word for Bumble bee in Swedish is Humla, and the combination sounded nice.

They say that aerodynamically a bumble bee should not be able to fly, and with these tiny wings on the HumbleBee prototype she certainly doesn’t look like being able to fly, but I didn’t tell her so up she went. (October 2016)

I was lucky with good wind and didn’t even have to adjust the bridle.

 

A week later I had found a good body model (Swedish Mörk jordhumla [Dark Earth Bumble Bee]) and made the necessary adjustments.