JUST MY STUFF
For The Love of
Kiting…and Dad
When
we were kids, we've flown kites at one time or another, and perhaps, picked up
the hobby again, later in life as I did.
I remember Dad and I going out with the Sunday funnies and cotton twine
at about 10 years of age, or so. Dad
made a 3 sparred, 6 sided kite with a 6 line bridle. I'll bet most of you have
similar memories. So this is in his memory… thanks for getting me interested,
Dad!!
Kites fell in amongst the interests of
being a boy of nearly insatiable curiosity.
Like many kids of the time, I dabbled in several hobbies at once
including normal sports interests that we obligingly had as boys; model planes,
butterfly collecting, stamps, hunting, scouting, and the like. Summer times were great in the central valley
of
Now,
that my 6th decade, "Baby-Boomer" age is here, I can now
indulge my hobby interests a bit more seriously. Having gotten thru Ham Radio, R/C Sailplanes,
Hot-Rods, Motorcycles, Fly Fishing and tying (although still active), Varmint
shooting, and kites, I have found a niche.
The NPW is my main point of interest now, but here's the story of how
this whole thing got started again, several years ago…
Val
(my lifetime partner, A.K.A., spouse) and I were on vacation on
Never
having seen ANYTHING like it before, my interest was set aflame! Some kind of controllable kites!! I told Val I HAD to go down and take a look
and would meet her at the car in about 15 minutes. Plenty of time, right? Nope!
By the time I got down to the grass area where the guys had been flying,
they had already packed up and were GONE!!
5 LOUSY MINUTES LATER!! GONE!
Auuunngh!! I bitched LOUDLY *to* sweet
Val about having missed them to see what it was…. Damn! Never saw or heard them again, but the
curiosity was now rampant.
Forward 1 year later, back in the
Having learned to sew at an early age from
Mom (Scouting Merit badge and such, and thank you, too Mom!), I looked at the
Cheetah carefully. With previous
experiences scratch building model planes and making my own shirts overseas
with Val's help (huge was too small over there), I said to myself: "I can
do this… only BIGGER, and at a considerably lesser cost!! More pull, more
fun... I had to answer that testosterone
call!!
I'd already discovered a fabric
remnant shop with bolt ends of suit coat lining after I'd priced Rip-Stop
material at nearly ten bucks a square yard!
(Shiver!) At two-bits (25 cents)
a running yard @ 60" wide certainly had its appeal after that! (I ultimately really stocked up on this stuff
in a lot of pastel colors when I found clearances at a dime a yard, and I'm
glad I did.) After measuring, plotting,
and all, Tom Marvin at "Fly-'Em-High" guided me to the right size
spars and generally helped me via phone and email (and very cautiously, I might
add,) get a 13 foot spread Cheetah built.
It's the kite you see this print superimposed on at the opening of this
website. This was the beginning of quite
a trek through kite land and leading up to the Nasa ParaWing. The rest of this story, I will tell in the
way of pictures taken much in chronological order of my short journey to
date. Please enjoy as you will.
If
you've any questions, or care to chat in any way about anything, gimme an
email!
May the wind always BE at your
back!! Bill < NPWBill@cox.net > 
This is a scaled up 13 foot copy of that
Cheetah over the harbor at Kahalui,
This 12' Delta was flown at the Phoenix
Kite Festival in 1999. This was my first serger project. There's 0ver 100 feet
of seams on this kite and with the serger it only took about an hour and a half
to cut out and sew with a buddy kite flyer's help (Dick Price). Even so, I
still spent nearly 2 1/2 hours folding and sewing the resultant seams down flat
on the backside with a regular zig-zag stitch on a standard sewing
machine. That first kite using the
serger made me a true believer in sergers for their speed and strong stitch.
Speed-wings were the next kite to catch my
fancy. One led to 3 and then to 4. This pic was taken on a soccer field in
Fun things start to happen when buddies
visit from out of town. Ron Wescott,
from Ohio, and I got the bright idea of using 6 mil construction visqueen
plastic, glass fiber tape and plasticized aluminum arbor stakes for the spines
on this 8' sled. (That's Ron on the right.)
Needless to say, the thing pulled like a truck but didn't manage to
break the 130# line we used to fly it.
Lotsa fun that blustery day! With
a 100' tube tail it's quite a site. Well
worth the half hour or so it took to make it.
Seems
pretty obvious that I'm into bigger kites.
Yes, somewhat, but after the discovery of the NasaWing, that attitude
has changed a bit. I've also tried
several other kinds of kites, many of which I don't have pix of, and I don't
want to bore you with any of those details…
A 4
foot flexi (far left) is made using a pair of solid fiberglass fishing
poles. Flies pretty well, but only in
good, stiff breezes. VERY FAST. The pic to the immediate left is a 10'span
Flexi which I still haven't been able to get in the air as yet. The front top keeps collapsing on take-off…
I'll get it one day, maybe after I semi-retire.
I might even burn out the screening and bridle it like a foil!! I've too much time and sewing in it to toss
it.
These are Peter Lynn type home made Tri-Delts, and are one of the few
kites I've purchased after buying the Cheetah.
The Pink/Green one is bigger than a garage
door and is made with absolutely wonderful workmanship. A thing of beauty in the sky and stable as a
rock- I mean it seems to sit up there like it was on top of an invisible
pole. It came with a complete KAP kit,
including 2 channel Radio Control and rigging, parachute climber an all...
The
Grey/White pic is of Dick Price's Tri-Delt leaning up against his van. Just a bit smaller in size, but a great
flyer!! Unfortunately, I haven't a pic
of it in the air, but plan to at one of the next Anthem Festivals in
Now
comes one of my favorites… the Nasa Para Wing, or the NPW. Hard pulling, simple to make, and inexpensive
to build, this type kite was a natural for me, and the sewing machines. I've made 19 of them to date and now they're
all over the country as a few have been sold off.
POWER!! FUN & FLY!!
This
was my first attempt at making my own eNPW5.
It's the mate to a pair that I made at the same time... I made them
opposites, or color negative images of one another. One is in my bag, and the
sister is now in
The thing picked Dick up about 4-5 feet
in the air and set him downwind about 40-50 feet away, and thank the Lord he
wasn’t hurt!! (I didn't want to loose
one of my best friends, so I took it away from him. Consequently, he snitched
my 2.6M Maroon and black one. More his
size in those winds! Fine with me…)
They are each 4.0M^2 and flew well on 2
lines right "out of the bag."
Later conversion to 4 line flying got me hooked into changing all my
NPW's to 4 lines. The two pix below were taken just after I bridled them
both. I think the above pic has to be
one of the best I have of any of my kites in the air. The symmetry is awesome. I took the photo myself while flying it, and
that’s no easy task! Try it yourself one
day….
I learned a lot making these two kites. It took nearly two weeks to
finish them as they were my very first NPW’s I’d made, and the second attempt
at sewing kites. I purchased 5 yards of
each color, deciding to make them and give one to my buddy, Dick Price, in
My second NPW, a 3.0M^2, was a different
combination of colors… quite different from the usual bright, almost glowing
rip-stop colors most kites are made of.
The lavender and cream colors were the only suit lining available at the
time from the cloth shop, so I went with it.
The kite is much prettier in real life with the sun shining off the
wings. I made some Speed-Wings of this same material and many thought they
looked pretty good. This NPW was originally made for 2 line flying, but then
was converted to 4 lines about a year later.
If you look closely, note the lack of a dart near the "A-1"
and "B-1" attachments in the left, older photo. Got in too big a hurry and forgot it!! Like a little kid, aren't I? …Just ask the
wife!
It was about 2 years after converting the
3.0 to 4 lines, I was made aware of a new "Cascade" type bridle. Andy Hook of the
If you want to know more about the Cascade
Bridle click here: Cascade In the Cascade page is a list of knots and
several links to really great calculator programs for both the NPW5 and the
NPW9b…
The
third set of NPW kites I made were two little 2.4 and 2.6 meter kites of the
same color scheme that I mentioned above.
They were my first experience sewing spinnaker cloth. Not easy to work with as one side is rubbery,
so very sticky on the sewing machine plate.
Great little flyer on 4 lines, tho'.
I tried sewing loops on the corners using
leading edge material, and looping the 200# LINE. It worked fairly well, but a lot of extra
work for very little gain, other than, perhaps, a much more finished,
professional look. This is one of the
pair that Dick Price snitched on
Look closely, and you can see I still need
a bit of trimming on the 2 lower brake lines to curve the bottom properly. The shadows make it look worse than it
actually was, but makes it easier to see the flattening of the tail end. This 2.6 is bridled B-5,6 and A-10, 11, &
12 and is probably the most responsive NPW of this size I had made up to that
date. The 2.4 I have is nowhere near
that responsive and I'll re-bridle it with a cascade one day with the above
brake configurations.
This was next; a 1.7M^2 I made just using a
conventional sewing machine. I used
stiff nylon leading edge material, the stuff used on stunt kite leading edges,
around the outside leading edges and center panel. I sandwiched a fold of it into the center panel
seams and used nylon bias tape and black parachute cord for the rest of the
perimeter. The 200# cord doesn't want to
pull through the sides of the seam as I thought it might. This style of construction is a bit
"fiddley", however this is a great little NPW in 10-20Mph
winds!! It made me think that maybe a
one meter NPW would be a lot of fun in higher winds and using much shorter
lines.
This little guy IS quite a blast in higher
winds. In the photo on the left it was
hardly in the air for lack of airspeed.
Note the drooping left brake line.
I made one important discovery… When flying smaller NPW's, use much
smaller and shorter 4 line handles, and limiting lines help from
over-controlling!!
So, I made two smaller ones- and they are a
blast!! The pull is pretty impressive for a ONE METER NPW, and they do best in
heavier winds... at about 15-25 mph, not that they don't fly in lighter winds.
They are quick and very responsive, to say the least. It only likes really
short handles, like I said above!
They fly much too fast for me to get a pic of them while flying, so maybe I'll get some fellow flyer to set down his handles and take a couple of flying pix for me… Note, too, that this one does NOT have the Cascade bridle. Too small!! The looping back of the lines account for more line than the bridle itself!
Then came the 5.0M "Killer
Bee". (Thanks again to Dave Adams
for the name and the inspiration!) The
pic left is just after it’s 1st takeoff. I was flying alone and used the little Nissan
Pickup for a backstop showing it's relative size. I barely had time to snap
this shot 
before the kite was out of view!! The little 2.0M Wee Bee came soon
thereafter- 
The pic of the 2.0 on the floor, left, is
before bridling. My ideas for the "Bee" series came from a Yakko kite
(below.) These "Bee" kites are fun to fly and really draw
attention. I added a 10M Giant Killer
Bee to the family just recently. The sewing is straight forward, and includes a
bit 
of appliqué for the eyes. 2-2.5 meters seems to be about the best size
for fun NPW's, so materials are pretty much kept to a minimum. But, like I said, I'd had such a success with
the open weave cloth, I went bigger!! I
know, I'm nuts, but can you imagine a 10M on 100 foot lines?!! It fills the whole sky...<grin>) Wow!
The pix left of my first 6.0M, and my
brother-in-law, Lars. I named it
"Benedictine". This kite
literally scared me half to death and I won't fly it in winds over 8-10
Mph. 60+ square feet of NPW is something
to come to terms with if you're not in a buggy. I've finished tuning the bridles and finally
have a fair pic. It's absolutely beautiful in the air... It looked astoundingly
huge on 100ft lines when the sail filled properly. As the shrouds stretch, the
kite takes on its familiar shape, and I realized why I use fairly light Dacron
lines for bridling... They stretch a bit and the shrouds seem to
"adjust" to what they best need to be*. It's something else to see when you watch the
wind fill out the sail under power.
* In
trying to save material making these large kites, I tend not to follow the
common course of paying close attention to the grain, or weave of the cloth.
The leading edges occasionally end up being on the bias. This lets the flying edges pull a bit out of
shape, or pucker at the edges which, to me, seems to "round out" or
soften the overall shape of the kite. That, coupled with using the lighter
Dacron bridling, helps establish the shape!
I follow Peter deJong's plan, of course.
They work well for me, and I follow his bridling exactly when making the
classic 2 and 4 line bridles.
I have
since made 2 other 6.0's for other folks.
This big, 6 meter kite now has brothers in
To the left is an original inspiration I
had for a future kite for quite a while.
Either in 3.0M, or thereabouts in size, is what I’d hoped for and it
ended up being a 135Cm tall, and 2.5M^2 in size. Because of the wider center panel and higher
Aspect Ratio, the 9b is a full half a square meter bigger in area than it’s
cousin, the NPW5, and they’re both the same height. Note the reddish black head, left. Vultures don’t have feathers on their heads
for reasons I won’t delve into here.
Anyhow, the head ended up being bright red, and the eyes a bit different
in shape. It also became an NPW9b… The result is below… Check out the webpage: NPW9b Vulture for
pix and more info.
The
NPW9b “Vulture”
135Cm Keel 2.7M^2 sail…
If you want to check out other
folks’ plans of the 9b, Tom White’s page at
http://members.shaw.ca/kiteman/ and JP Gleyzes site, the true http://freedom2000.free.fr/NPW_index_eng.html
(You will find EXCELLENT building tips and pointers to help you with the NPW9’s
as well as the NPW 5’s.)
Many thanks to Larry Green for those most excellent renderings in Tom’s program about the tying and how-to pix.!! Without ALL you guys; Andy Hook (UK), Stelios (Greece), Jacques Bayman (South Africa), JP Gleyzes (France), and both Tom White and Larry Green (Canada), we couldn’t have done it without US… Thank you one and ALL!!
I made this is a little 4 line NPW (2.4M)
for Rusty Plummer in
One of the more recent NPW's I
made is what I call the "Salsa Limon". The material I used for the Salsa is a very
open weave nylon cloth, not unlike chiffon. The pix don't do the color scheme
much justice, but believe me, the green is a vivid, wild, bright florescent
green. The kind you see on roadway
safety vests; ungodly bright!!
Smaller kites are very sensitive
to input and I wanted something a bit bigger, but slower, and with less pull
than is usually experienced in 15+ Mph winds on this size NPW. This kite was an experiment that seems to have
worked. Oh, it still pulls like crazy,
is VERY quick, and quite agile in spite of being that soft, nylon cloth. Now the temptation to make the 10 meter
"Killer Bee" came to pass. I
had found the right material and in the colors I needed for the Giant Killer Bee...
So
here it is… The Gigantic Killer Bee 10.0 sq. meters, or ju-u-ust about- it's
9.75 M^2. Damned thing shrunk when I had
to trim the wings even on both sides and then washed it before bridling, I
ended up with 112" tall and not 114".
Oh, well… by commercial measurements it’s TEN METERS!!! Nearly every commercial kite I've seen was
never the full claimed measurement… almost, but not quite, so I guess I'll make
that claim, too-
I still have to get the fine tuning done,
as extra time for me in the (summer) season is minimal. I made this monster, and now I can't really
finish it, yet. Perhaps I can get to 
as great as it certainly would be using
Rip-stop or close weaved suit lining… thank goodness… But, again, the open weave cloth really makes
a huge difference in the pull of the kite for it’s size. The open weave opens the door for much larger
kites without the danger (by comparison.)
Look
closely for the kite’s shadow beneath the kite just near the rear wheel and
this side of the sidewalk. I had this
pic taken with the kite next to my Nissan pickup to show the relative size of
this monster!! I've managed to fly it
about 3 times, but the winds were very fickle and proper tuning was just out of
the question. The stretchiness of the
fabric makes it a bit more difficult to tune, and I think I transposed a couple
of the shrouds… something I seem to do on a regular basis!
Nevertheless, it flies!! It’s
gorgeous in the air with bright, new, shiny material that nearly glows in the
sunlight.
Odds & Ends… this was a kick so I added it in… Wind Blankets can be very pretty and quite an
eyeful. Randy Shannon, a fellow kite flyer from
So there you have
it for now. I will occasionally post new
pix of my endeavors… keep in touch and don't be afraid to inquire as to what's
new, and how things are going!!
Now, you might check out my other
NPW sites dedicated to the NPW freaks like me, their kites, my very unorthodox
building techniques and what I believe to be the biggest NPW gallery on the
internet. There is also a pair new NPW9b
sites. Enjoy!
NPWBill http://members.cox.net/npwbill/NPWBill.htm
Vulture Page http://members.cox.net/superwino1/VulturePage.htm
Gallery9b http://members.cox.net/superwino1/Gallery9b.htm
The “5” Gallery http://members.cox.net/npwbill/TheGallery.htm
Thanks
for looking… May the wind always BE at your back!!
BillP NPWBill@cox.net
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