It's in general that brands that have (or recently changed from) double frontline safety have pulley's. You need the pulley to allow most kites to flip on their back. You can easily check this yourself. Moving to single frontline safety opens more design freedom like short bridles and/or leaving out the pulley.
There are some practiacal things which (imo) are correct:
1 - Pulley gives more depower
2 - No pulley is less change on a bridle replacement which in my experience is very! rare (we use sliders)
The rest is subjective (imo). Liking a kite and brand is subjective as well and a much better discriminator for making choices then the kite having a pulley or not
Some people won’t know a good kite even if the wind gods handed it to them in the middle of their session in ocean and said hey noob try this. Like someone said nowadays , kites are designed to please noobs and hype men. I’ve flown every type of kite over 15 years of kiting and Thts why I fly foil kites as it does every thing I need to do and Better than an LEI kite considering I’m not into twisting my body into a pretzel every session. offcourse u can design a pulley less kite but is it an all round better or more efficient kite compared side by side I don’t think so .
It's in general that brands that have (or recently changed from) double frontline safety have pulley's. You need the pulley to allow most kites to flip on their back. You can easily check this yourself. Moving to single frontline safety opens more design freedom like short bridles and/or leaving out the pulley.
There are some practiacal things which (imo) are correct:
1 - Pulley gives more depower
2 - No pulley is less change on a bridle replacement which in my experience is very! rare (we use sliders)
The rest is subjective (imo). Liking a kite and brand is subjective as well and a much better discriminator for making choices then the kite having a pulley or not
There you go, a passive pulley that is mainly doing its stuff when the kite gets flagged. Flag an Ozone side by side a kite with 1 pulley and you will see what it does. (And why it is good). In my experience also with kites designed with a single line safety
Last edited by dwarf on Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.
This industry is driven by beginners, fifth line haters and marketing hype followers. If it wasn't, all Ckites and open Ckites would be flown on five lines. I suspect it is more difficult to decrease bar pressure with bridle on a Ckite because the wings are square and close behind the nose so you don't get enough leverage. I would not buy a bridled CKite but you go ahead and buy yourself a pulley bridled garbage or whatever latest fashion.
Designing a kite with pulleys is the easiest thing to do, all you have to do is make a kite with lots of attachment points, fly the kite and experiment by attaching the bridle to certain points until you get it right. I'm not saying it's easy I'm just saying it's about 1000 times easier than making a good pulley less kite. It's taken me about 15 years to design a kite that has More power and more depower while holding its shape and turning easily and faster turning and more wind range than previouslydesigned pulley kites. if you do it right a pulley less kite will hold it's shape when completely over powered and powered up and turning
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I am curious about "easy" and "easier" to design. I would have thought that it is difficult to determine the principles of an aspect of kite design, but once they're understood it should be no harder to do than any other thing.
Certainly it would be difficult to work out how to design a kite with no pulleys in the first place, because those kites never really existed before. Now they're common and the principles seem to be reasonably well known by professional kite designers. So why is it hard to do now?
An example would be the explosion in hydrofoiling. Ten years ago foils were crap and everybody believed it was hard. Now every man and his dog is making hydrofoils and we're riding them in the surf and doing freestyle. It's easy now.
In the paragliding world there are several gun designers for hire. They do the technical designs for lots of companies. There are small number of software packages used that do all the analysis and everybody uses them under licence. The magic happens when the test pilots get their hands on the wings and trim and tune them in the real world. Is kiting different?
Like you said it comes down to the fine tuning. With a pullyless kite every time you make a small change you have to remake the whole bridle.
Assuming you make the kite right...
To make one pullyless kite that unhooks without back stalling and jumps high and depower alot with alot of bottom end power and keeps its shape when fully depowered and relaunches well and wave rides well and turns fast and kite loops well can hold a 140kg rider in 40 knots without distorting and with a nice springy feel comes down to alot of testing and tweaking and a lot of bridles made tested and thrown away.
To make a pulley kite. You can simply get a kite with lots of attachment points and experiment by trying a combination to see what works best for you without remaking the bridles every time.
To make one pullyless kite that ... {performs well ] .... comes down to alot of testing and tweaking and a lot of bridles made tested and thrown away.
I'll agree that a pullyless bridle requires more testing, but a prototype pullyless bridle would not be made from fixed-length segments with stitched loops at each ends like production bridles are made. Instead segments would made in two pieces with a loop and lots of knots so that segment length is easily adjusted and tuning the bridle segments slightly longer or shorter is fast and easy.
After all the tuning and testing is complete, then single-piece production bridle segments are made.
I'll agree that a pullyless bridle requires more testing, but a prototype pullyless bridle would not be made from fixed-length segments with stitched loops at each ends like production bridles are made. Instead segments would made in two pieces with a loop and lots of knots so that segment length is easily adjusted and tuning the bridle segments slightly longer or shorter is fast and easy.
After all the tuning and testing is complete, then single-piece production bridle segments are made.
Not sure if that would work, 1cm out on one line will throw out a pully-less bridle, both split V bridles lines would need to have an even 50% pull, moving a bridle point 5cm on the leading edge would mean almost every other bridle line would need to be adjusted for even pull. The thought of having to adjust every line by using knots when you move a line 5cm on the leading edge sounds like it may not be the best method. I use calculations, so when one of the 5 lines attached to the leading edge is moved, every other line length will be automatically adjusted to sharing the load evenly, guessing with knots may not be as accurate or fastest way to make an accurate bridle.
Prototype paragliders are made with multiple attachment points and lines with knots and loops. The test pilots fly around, top land, adjust, take off, repeat.
Paraglider line sets are vastly more complex than a kite bridle. The lines have to support the 3d structure and handle changes in shape due weight shifting and operating the speed bar (pushing out the bar in kite terms).
The comparison only holds true to an extent. In a paraglider the relationship between the pilot and the wing is mostly static. A kite wangs around at the end of 25m lines and the pilot is constantly edging and releasing so the loading changes.
