SoutherlyBuster

That looks sweet! Anyone know what the price is going to be?
There's a couple of new foils that are priced pretty nicely, like the new North foil and the Shinn.

The Victorian Alps received 1m of snow last weekend, needless to say it's was epic conditions after the "Blizzard of Oz" finished. 
I planned to do an in-depth review of the 9m Hyperlink, comparing it to the 9m ChronoV2UL B2B. 
However the wind was light, after this photo I swapped up to riding 13m ChronoV2UL 
A review will still be coming, just need more wind, hopefully next session!
What I can say, was the Hyperlink was super easy to launch in light wind, it flew well at its low end ( around 10knots ) and packed down perfectly. 
 

PL Aero on the way?  

On the facebook page of BORN KITE there is some new information about StreetStar.
 
 
 
 

Certainly want a kite you can trust in this terrain.
 

Photobucket has a hack, type ~original at the end of the link (before [/IMG]) and the image will appear. Working for now at least....

Nah! Go big, or go home ;-)
Made this one in 2000, still going strong!

Going to knock one of these up next maybe half size first. Full size uses about 35 mtrs of material. Ouch. If goes well will do the bigger one later. Kids love them but they tend to get a pounding. Maybe the bigger one should be in 1.5 ounce cloth. Wont be as colourful as this fella either. 2 or 3 colours work for me.

Thanks Steve!  @windstruck sent me kite that steffen sent him to try out.  Kite control was intuitive but still took time to get the hang of while moving.  My style of street kiting involves a lot of fluid transitions in a semi confined area so that's what I wanted to test first.  It took me a good hour to get transitions down.  The main reason is one handed control.  This is where it gets hard to explain and will vary for different riders.  I'm goofy footed (right foot first) and I transition from frontside to backside and ride toe side so my right foot is always forward.  keep in mind your thumb always needs to be pointed to the top of the bar.  This means I'm comfortably riding toe side using my right hand (I'm right handed) but when I transition there are 2 options.  continue to hold the bar in my right hand but upside down (a little awkward but doable) or switch hands and use my left.  I've never been good flying left handed so that took a lot of time to get down.  Keep in mind your switching hands during the transition.  All that is to say that when I use a normal bar on a nasa star, I would always fly toe side one handed with my strong hand and when I would transition to front side, I would be flying with both hands on the bar so I've never been forced to use my left hand solely.  I've only used it for a couple hours so far so this will probably be a minor hurdle and something that I already was getting good at by the time I left.
The relaunch and landing works flawlessly.  Really impressive.  The turning works well but does take some practice and getting used to as to be expected.  My first impression is that a standard nasa star would be much easier for a beginner but for intermediates, this kite offers a much more dynamic flying experience and most likely will have much better upwind capability.  I'll test that out when the wind direction cooperates for a couple of my long road spots.
Transitions were much more similar to flying my peak on handles as far as how the kite behaves but using just one handle for all control.  Very wild and fun kite.  It does take some skill to use but I like that.
I would like to add some 2m or 5m lines to see how that goes.  I will take a look at how easy that will be to add next time I'm out.

You should do a Skydive on the Friday afternoon, they land in Elwood Park which is also a great little park for kiting...
Lots of Paraponters hang out here, you will get to see the whole city while falling back to earth.

Jan O'Loughlin made a really cool spider ground bouncer, about 10 years ago.
Coolum220.MOV

Yesterday was awesome. 
14ish knots. Clear sky's and a handful of stoked Kiter's.
The cover is excellent with more snow forecast tonight. 
Facebook has a new snowkiting group called:-
VIC Snowkiter, worth checking out.
54.4km/h top speed on the way back from Mt McKay summit, the snow was a good compromise between soft and fast. 
9m ChronoV2UL

Soloshot 3 is getting closer after people pre-ordering over a year ago.  Here's some footage from the new Soloshot3...
 

@SoutherlyBuster for splicing lines, like the small white ones on the flysurfer, I use a doll needle from spotlight. The eye is large engough to get the line through and it's easy to feed up the centre of the line.
just dull the point with a file so that doesn't catch any of the braided.

Speed III 12m^2 all fixed up qnd tested with a static fly  . Flies great, no bridle lines went ping, steering all the way it should be. Left hand side of kite took all afternoon to sort out, hmm where does this knot go, hey that knot is not documented in the line plan, oh bugger better record all the connections if I dissasemble the bridles, oy Pixel (my cat) get out of there, lunch break, dinner break, ok so the list goes on. So once I figured out what needs to be dissasembled to replace the worn bridles, the right hand side repairs went through quickly in 45 minutes. Those little connectors (LC) came in really handy, so only had to dissconnect the bridles from there to the one needing replacement -- clever. Hint, if you are replacing say the B lines, grab all the A lines and hang them from somewhere, like a tripod to keep them out of the way. Also bunch the loose bridles with a rubber band so they do not tangle as all the larks head knots are threaded through, unless you take pleasure in untangling bird's nests!
So now I have scketch of where all the bridles and knots go. Savings = x10 ! By the way all the sewing of the bridles was done by hand since I do not have a foot or sewing machine base plate with a groove to keep the bridle aligned.

Speed III 12m^2 all fixed up qnd tested with a static fly  . Flies great, no bridle lines went ping, steering all the way it should be. Left hand side of kite took all afternoon to sort out, hmm where does this knot go, hey that knot is not documented in the line plan, oh bugger better record all the connections if I dissasemble the bridles, oy Pixel (my cat) get out of there, lunch break, dinner break, ok so the list goes on. So once I figured out what needs to be dissasembled to replace the worn bridles, the right hand side repairs went through quickly in 45 minutes. Those little connectors (LC) came in really handy, so only had to dissconnect the bridles from there to the one needing replacement -- clever. Hint, if you are replacing say the B lines, grab all the A lines and hang them from somewhere, like a tripod to keep them out of the way. Also bunch the loose bridles with a rubber band so they do not tangle as all the larks head knots are threaded through, unless you take pleasure in untangling bird's nests!
So now I have scketch of where all the bridles and knots go. Savings = x10 ! By the way all the sewing of the bridles was done by hand since I do not have a foot or sewing machine base plate with a groove to keep the bridle aligned.

Yeah, when you look at them side by side there are a few differences. Trailing edge strap. Different thickness material? Even different number intake vents.

Time to up the over-building over-engineering there @Chook & @andy666  
 

Got some 260 kg 2mm spectra / dyneema for the pulleys and 4mm 900 kg for the depower, will see how it goes. No worries with the google maps was easy enough to find from your instructions.

As I mentioned in another thread, I have a heap of material left over from building 1830 F-arc's. The f-arcs are made from good quality chikara ripstop and it is too good to just throw out, so I decided I needed to put it to good use.
I have been playing with Surf Plan for a while now and although I can get a design that looks good, I have no idea if the design will fly or not. Then one day looking threw some old archived websites, I found a link to the surf plan design specs for a 6m p-arc. P-arc (P=parallel) was the original name of the F-arc, but was changed before release because Parc backwards is crap  
SurfPlan Download
P-arc base.sle

anyway, I decided it was worth giving it a go since I already had the material. So I got the plans printed out on A0 paper and set to work.

first thing I had to do was unpick every seam on the remaining sections of 16m f-arc, which took a lot longer then expected.
next came the marking out and cutting. Because I was working with material that had been folded and crushed, rather then off the roll, it was a nightmare getting it to lay flat to trace the outline on to. I had to flatten an then clamp the corners to the table. As well as the outline of each piece surfplan also allows you to add waypoints so everything can be aligned after being cut.
I used a hot knife to cut all the pieces out to make it a bit quicker and stop the edges from fraying.



i then used double sided tape to stick all the pieces of the top and bottom skin together for sewing. The ribs were too difficult to stick in place, so they were just aligned and stitched as I went. (A walking foot attachment from eBay makes sewing ripstop sooo much easier)



The surfplan design didn't have spar pockets, so I made them from some 50mm webbing and stitched them to the end cells. 
I also added internal front and rear straps of 25mm webbing, similar to the more modern arcs. Like the modern arcs, the rear strap has adjustment for the middle 5 cells and wingtip 5 cells. I also made the front line adjustable at the middle 5 cells, in case the kite was prone to backstall.

And the finished product.....
flat area: 6m
wing span: 6m 
AR: 6.0

I estimate it took about 100hrs, cost $150 and countless ?
 

Ever seen volume quoted like this?

Honestly norm, if you are just buying a length of line to make the pulley line yourself, you are better off just buying some 3mm bridle line from FixMyKite and save a some $$
The smaller sleeved sections of bridle can be made with 2mm bridle line and the thin white bridles can be made using 150lb or 200lb stunt kite line

@Kamikuza do you fly one handed often on the foil, like I do for my uni-directional? I found at least with my Synergy Arc one handed is a lot harder, ie need to keep fighting with the kite to stop it auto-zenithing. Perhaps it is a lot easier with the new charger plus the pulleys are kept on the kite rather than taken off like with my 8m Synergy.

I wonder if the ozone marketing team believe half the shit they dribble  
truely innovative and the first kite to bridge the gap between foil and inflato? It a mid aspect closed cell foil! Ozone are not the first to do this (flysurfer psycho, hq neo...), but it seems all kitesurfers know about is high aspect race foils. Probably because that's all the big names have offered them so far  
I'm not sure why they needed to reinvent the wheel though, by having open and closed cell option? Yes an open cell foil will have more power then a similar size closed cell and inflate instantly at launch. But this has 7? open cells, which will do virtually nothing different to having the cells "closed"
but people will buy it because, lets face it, one of the best things ozone do is marketing