Kite Plans

http://www.kiteplans.org/

by erdosjr • 7 years ago

209 55 7 years ago

monk_e_boy• 7 years ago

Henry Hulk, wow, haven't heard that name in years. Nice designs.

No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.

TimTheTinker• 7 years ago

Don’t forget the middle. There are many excellent spots for flying kites away from the coast.

One of my favorite kite shops is out of Boulder, Colorado: Into The Wind[0]

I’ve only bought from them once or twice, but I used to spend hours paging through their paper catalog as a kid. I also visited their shop in Boulder as a teen — that was really fun.

[0] https://intothewind.com

thefifthsetpin• 7 years ago

My brother got his daughter a kite from there. The wind didn't cooperate on the first day we went to fly it, but her dad and I still tried getting it into the air by running with the string to see if we could get it high enough that it'd catch what wind there was higher up. We failed, but my niece saw us running with the kite, so she wanted to run with the kite. She had a great time running around the park with the kite bouncing on the ground behind her.

The kite survived that & flew fine on later occasions. Now that she's seen it fly, though, she has lost interest in kites that won't fly.

seraphsf• 7 years ago

When I was 10, the Into the Wind catalog lit my imagination in so many ways. It was a fantasy novel crossed with a science book.

A couple years ago I wandered past their store in Boulder and was floored that there was a real, physical incarnation of that magical catalog. I took my little kids there this winter and it was like passing a spark between generations.

mxfh• 7 years ago

Maybe in market value with all the gear that comes with it, but unlikely by numbers. Regular kite festivals still draw massive numbers anywhere in europe and casual or kid kites are still at thing. Regular kites where really huge in the late 80s and 90s for some weird reason, with any bigger town in Germany having at least one dedicated kite shop.

Berlin last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgXxSKhpbc

Fanø: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHM_DCpt0tM

All this without even mentioning places like Pakistan or India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zSQruHvsvA

timmaah• 7 years ago

https://archive.org/details/softkiteswindsoc00rowl

Toadsoup2• 7 years ago

Edit: I can accept that kite plans can be on topic for HN. I also don't mean to stifle anyone's curiosity about kites or kite building.

I suppose I expected something more akin to "Kite Plans, Experiments, Observations, and Results that SoAndSo ran" or "Specific Kite Plan and Notes" to be linked on HN.

If you're new to kites, good news, it's a lot more fun than it should be.

--- Original Post: I am confused, why this link is on HN?

I enjoy kites and have used this site before, but what makes it worth the front page of HN? It's nothing new, their site hasn't really changed in years, and it is somewhat off topic.

Was the poster just fired up about kites? Am I missing something?

RobotCaleb• 7 years ago

I'm curious what you consider on-topic.

moftz• 7 years ago

"Bitcoin Miner Docker Image Written in Rust Running on a Model 3"

tonyarkles• 7 years ago

It definitely meets the “satisfies intellectual curiosity” criteria for me! I think we’re giving it the HN hug of death right now (or my phone internet sucks here), but I’ll definitely be checking back later and maybe building one this weekend.

Kites are pretty cool and, as this site points out pretty dramatically, can go from super simple to technically very complex and interesting.

erdosjr• 7 years ago

Apart from being fun, there is a good amount of engineering in designing kites.

For example, NASA has been experimenting with designing simple parachutes [1] and it turned out that the parawings (or Rogallo wings) are pretty good traction kites, too. The NPW kites are still popular kites as they are cheap to make and long-wearing in use.

[1] http://2e5.com/kite/nasa/reports/

jfoutz• 7 years ago

It's neat!

Am I missing something?

Yeah. you've been around here for a while, so i suspect you know the answer. But hey, maybe this will help. The first part is the boring answer

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1]

So anyhow, given you'd actively used the kite site it the past, you should be able to see how it satisfied your own intellectual curiosity in the past. Clearly, it's not relevant to you today, but perhaps you can see how it's relevant to others. Also, your experience can help drive some conversation with new kite makers.

the second part is some gentle advice - please don't take this as a criticism, just an observation. Try to take joy in other people being one of the 10,000 [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Toadsoup2• 7 years ago

Thanks, This was a super useful reply.

xutopia• 7 years ago

I had never heard of the site. It's something of interest to me.

omegaham• 7 years ago

Stuff that is old-hat to members of a subculture tends to be really interesting to people who didn't even know that the subculture existed.

The last time I flew a kite was in elementary school. I guess I knew in the abstract that people actually put thought and engineering into kites, but I never actually thought about it. Posts like this remind me of the enormous breadth of human hobbies, and they're really interesting.

As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1], and today, I'm one of the lucky 10,000.

[1]https://xkcd.com/1053/

hvs• 7 years ago

Due to the HN hug-of-death: https://web.archive.org/web/20190522135029/http://www.kitepl...

slacka• 7 years ago

What's the deal with the sketchy "PDF viewer" that they tried to force Chrome users to install? This is an example where a site actually worked better in Firefox and Edge.

groovybits• 7 years ago

Chrome, Firefox and Edge all come with PDF viewers by default. You do not need to install anything.

Rule of the internet: don't install things that you didn't ask for.

fouc• 7 years ago

When I think of kites, I always think of my dream of a kiteboat for long term cruising around the world.. purely kite powered, with maybe a small stabilizer sail if necessary.

losvedir• 7 years ago

That's interesting. What would be the advantages of that over an ordinary sailboat?

pacaro• 7 years ago

My understanding is that there are a variety of advantages: the kite flies in cleaner air; the thrust from the kite is applied at one point, with less heeling moment than from a sail; the design of the boat is not constrained by the structural requirement of a mast

IIRC A kite powered boat called Jacobs Ladder held various sailing speed records at one point

Xunxi• 7 years ago

NASA's exhaustive Kite index which covers the physics and Math of Kites. There is even a KiteModeler and interactive simulations for anyone who is interested

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/shortk.html

minikites• 7 years ago

Before drones were widely available, I attached an inexpensive camera to a kite to take some aerial photographs. I'm a little surprised that wasn't more common, given how popular drones are now.

kijin• 7 years ago

Perhaps the limiting factor was the lack of inexpensive cameras, not the lack of drones. There was only a short window of time between when remotely controllable lightweight cameras became cheap enough for people to not worry about crashing them into rocks, on the one hand, and when drones became widely available, on the other.

shaftway2• 7 years ago

Not that narrow. I remember in the late 80's / early 90's Estes had a model rocket that would pop a picture (onto film) from the nosecone when the chute charge went off. I have no idea what the quality was like (my parents refused to buy me one).

chadmaughan2• 7 years ago

Agreed. We got around this by hacking the single use CVS/Rite Aid cameras according to the below guide. Dropping one of these in the water or on some rocks didn't feel quite so devastating.

https://makezine.com/2008/02/29/how-to-cvs-video-camera-h/

dylan6042• 7 years ago

The stability of that kind of platform is a severely limiting factor. The 3-axis gimbal had a lot to do with making aerial photography a thing as much as the drone itself. I was part of a group where we launched a helium balloon to ~90,000' with 2 GoPros attached. The footage is so unstable in much the same way that I imagine being attached to a kite would be. The weight of the camera is at the end of a length of "string" which essentially makes it a pendulum. It just swings and swings and swings. Oh, and it also spins as it twists up the tension in the string, and then releases to spin back the other way. Just about the time all of the swinging and spinning relaxes, the balloon reaches max altitude and bursts.

chadmaughan2• 7 years ago

I also had a lot of fun KAPing before drones. Stabilization was handled fairly easy with a Picavet (or Pendulum) suspension system. Neat and low tech.

More details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_aerial_photography#Pica...

mcguire2• 7 years ago

Kite photography is still used at some archaeological sites for aerial photographs: some countries, particularly in the Middle East, are wary of people using drones with cameras.

One of the lectures on YouTube from the Oriental Institute had beautiful pictures of early (Old Kingdom?) Egyptian military and trading sites on the Nile in southern Egypt or possibly northern Sudan, and described the problems they had and why they used kites.

conroydave• 7 years ago

i always feel slightly bad for websites like this that HN brings hugs to death, even though ad supported, its normal users are unable to access their content

paulie_a• 7 years ago

Why? It's not like this will be permanent, a few hours probably. And many sites exist without ads. What's there to support? A few dollars a month in fees?

kingnothing• 7 years ago

The large effort to actually build and curate the content.

hahamrfunnyguy• 7 years ago

Kite building is a hobby I've always wanted to get into.A buddy of mine has build a few of the NASA-style Regallo kites. He uses them with his icebuggys. Apparently, they're not too difficult to make and icebuggys are a blast to pilot.

TACIXAT• 7 years ago

I was thinking recently that kites could make great signaling mechanisms for backpackers. It would be relatively light in your pack and can get a location noticed if you got lost. I'll have to dig through this site for simple designs that are easy to keep up in the air.

TremendousJudge• 7 years ago

Sounds useful but in limited situations -- open fields (so no forests) and windy but not too windy

silentguy• 7 years ago

Helium balloon would be a better option. Release it with other end tied to your backpack.

ElijahLynn• 7 years ago

Site is DDoSing right now because of this.

mirimir• 7 years ago

I love kites. Just seeing the word, I remember the boy-as-a-kite-on-ice-skates from The American Boy's Handy Book[0]

0) https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81LstaapceL...

SamPatt• 7 years ago

Kite building is actually fairly easy, and can be very inexpensive. With just wooden dowels, fabric, simple sewing and simple rope & knots you can have something flying in a few hours.

Takes a while to get the hang of troubleshooting the problems of flying, but the basics aren't complicated. Good cheap fun.

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