30/08/2020 Blackheath
A similar forecast to last Sunday but the wind was from the North today and the cloud cover gradually thickened.
Full vent 1.5s with race rods were fine again. We did manage to get the sound system set up properly so had the benefit of Bill Frisell for our final flying session which helped cover the background noise from the Bank Holiday fairground on the other side of the A2. Mr. Helicopter was unusually on our side of the road today doing all his trick flying but fortunately he didn’t stay long. It is a noisy machine.
In addition to the Rev flying today we put together the Peter Malinski Tetraeder from 1989. This was a kite that Jørgen owned and as part of the transaction from early 2019 we were asked to take care of it. In January 2020 I replaced all the rubber fixing loops with tied string. I had done a test build of a few cell but today was the first field test. We configured 20 cells in a regular tetrahedron which seemed a sensible place to start. I hand held the kite prior to tying the flying line to the spar fixing one level down from the top of the kite. The launch on the 40m line was remarkably smooth. Thereafter the kite occasionally needed a bit of manual input but was well behaved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSUDJQudgrY
At the end of the session a slightly over firm impact with the ground resulted in a couple of the fixing element splitting and it may be that they are all quite brittle with age. I will have to investigate further!
Felix
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