Bridle design software anyone?

[robmueck]

I have a long and sad story about my 6.3m cquad. When it came out of the bag it was great. One very happy buggier. Then after a while the leading edge started to buckle in under load. Made some enquiries and came across the Peter Lynn article on cquad bridling. This is where it goes pear shaped. In my arrogance, and armed with only the article, I thought that I would make a new adjustable bridle, bought some dyneema and proceeded to make a new bridle using individual bits of string, all with a series of knots in the end all joined to the next layer of the bridle with those (larks head?) slip loop thing a ma jingys. Anyway I spent the next two years in vain trying to get the thing to fly. Until God took pity on me and I met someone who had an identical kite, in original condition. Unbelievably generous, Peter offered to measure all the components of the bridle and send me the plan. So, now I at least have the bridle back to a flying state. You would think I would be satisfied.

I do not know if I had a slightly different bridle to start with or I have been spoilt by the 4m cquad I subsequently got, but I am still hoping for more out of the 6.3. My memory of the kite, was that it used to luff nicely without any braking, have loads of grunt and heaps of control with a little braking and would back up completely when the brakes where applied fully. This is my current experience of the 4m cquad. The 6.3 doesn?t luff at all, even with heaps of slack in the brake lines.

I thought I might use the measurements from the bridle to plot the profile of the kite in MS Excel or Visio. The idea of this was that I could experiment with different bridle lengths on the computer to see what effect it had on the profile. Trying to do this out on the field is difficult because you can?t actually see what it is doing to the profile when you are flying the kite and it is time consuming and confusing making incremental and infinite adjustments. The problem is I don?t have the trigonometric skill I had 25 years ago.

Can anyone help? Is there a kite design program out there that will assist in bridling design. Does anyone have the skill to write a formula/s that will plot a spar profile from the bridle lengths?

[Andy Mac]

Can't help but point out the main error made - buying a C-quad in the first place

[schmik]

try something called foilmaker : http://www.foilmaker.co.uk/

it measure out bridles for foils... don't know how it will go for a c-quad.

btw, let me know when the next full moon is.

schmik