Funalex ,Why Kites are Unstable and Autozenith

[plummet]

I have learned over the years that you get what you pay for. If its cheap its cheap for a reason. Workmanship, quality, technology or materials will be compromised to get the cheaper price point.

I personally do not want to be flying the cheapest kite I can find.

I use my foil kite for kite landboarding and buggying. It is very easy to be 10-15 foot high jumping the landboard. My spine and legs are worth way more than the cheapest kite I can find. I also kite in big wave rocky location. I don't want a shitty kite failing and in the worse possible place. That could be deadly.

f*** that shit. I buy the most expensive kite I can afford and the best quality lines.

[foilholio]

The price of something doesn't always dictate it's quality though often it does. There is a cheaper brand switch which is higher quality than the big names. You can often be paying for things other than quality when you buy expensive, name, advertising, distributors porsche, jeff bezos's toy rockets. Haha, only jokes Amazon is quite cheap.

Relying on kiteboard gear is risky at best. You are certainly wise to stick to more well known brands for jumping on land. Though I think of the well know ozone bar failures and recall, with videos of people soaring over snow mountains suddenly plummet ing, haha nice pun still got it. Flysurfers quality really took a dive post GFC, very sad to see.

Lower quality gear has it's place used appropriately.

[plummet]

The price of something doesn't always dictate it's quality though often it does. There is a cheaper brand switch which is higher quality than the big names.

I'll admit that the switch brand is made well. Infact my call they are over engineered. Leading to a heavy kite that doesn't perform as well as others. So even the switch model has compromises. It compromises the large knowledge base a distributor network can provide. There for there kites are not has high performance as some other brands who can draw on many more people for feedback. Their main designer doesn't even kites surf. So paying a part time or low cost designer yields less performance also.....

But as you say there is a market for cheap stuff and high performance stuff....

In the mountainbiking world there is a saying.

cheap, light, strong. Pick 2. Cheap and light wont be strong, cheap and strong wont be light... Light and strong wont be cheap.

Sure we can adapt that to kiting.

[foilholio]

Yep switch is over engineered, but not as bad as naish. Flying bricks they should be called. There is an even larger user base on the internet posting free feedback. If any of the brands had half a clue they would pay attention to what goes on here, especially modding threads. Maybe I go through the wrong channels but Flysurfer seem ignorant to their previous user base, good luck to them with their new racers they certainly have money. We could diverge even further into wealth inequality on that one.

I am really surprised about bill not kitesurfing, maybe he does some land stuff? You can really see from his yachting background the design mistakes he makes with kites. The same with Naishes windsurfing background. Sumized to say as a lack of appreciation for lower weight in kites. Though there is fundamental problems with inflatables and making them lightweight. Rigid structures need to be stronger than flexible ones and as such heavier. Removing the struts takes away weight and adds flexibility. Foils dont have a rigid bone in them. I can understand Switches desire to not have kites break. But as a seemingly flexible company they really could offer different products with different guarantees. It's not just kites that could be lightweight, not everyone unhooks and needs a bar you could use for riot control.

The most impressive thing about Pansh is the fabric used, weighs and performs much like Lotus fabric. It's great for the bigger kites but not so great for smaller ones used in high winds.

Don't underestimate the value improved by new technology. The internet has really changed the game how people connect with ideas and products. Whats going to happen when Amazon decides to sell kites. I think they have already started.

[Jamie-NYC]

I have learned over the years that you get what you pay for. If its cheap its cheap for a reason. Workmanship, quality, technology or materials will be compromised to get the cheaper price point.

I personally do not want to be flying the cheapest kite I can find.

I use my foil kite for kite landboarding and buggying. It is very easy to be 10-15 foot high jumping the landboard. My spine and legs are worth way more than the cheapest kite I can find. I also kite in big wave rocky location. I don't want a shitty kite failing and in the worse possible place. That could be deadly.

f*** that shit. I buy the most expensive kite I can afford and the best quality lines.

Plummet, you know what you want and need, great.

I kite in waves, sure, but not a "big wave rocky location", and likely will still use LEI in waves anyway (but hey, Pansh kite might be so great it changes my mind?). But I most often kite in summer light winds (when few waves), and am taking up foiling, and want to see what the foil kite is about. The Pansh a15 seems to me a reasonable way to do that.

You are correct that "you get what you pay for" is often true. But everyone has experienced exceptions to that rule. I do not expect the Pansh a15 to be better than a Flysurfer, Ozone, Elf, Paravis, whatever other foil kite. I do expect it to be a good value - that is, it is likely to fly well, and to give me some sense of what a foil kite is about. With any luck it will exceed expectations. That's it, simple calculus for me, but of course for others may be different, and you have now stated that indeed it is different for you. I get that.

[foilholio]

Hey jamie was that 6 days from when you ordered or after they shipped?

Oh and BTW thanks everyone for destroying my thread, haha lol

[Jamie-NYC]

Hey jamie was that 6 days from when you ordered or after they shipped?

Oh and BTW thanks everyone for destroying my thread, haha lol

Very sorry about destroying the thread, and thanks again for posting on the topic. I hope to keep up with your experiments with auto-zenith.

I ordered the kite on 12/3. received it 12/8. Was only 5 days, 2 of which were weekend.

[foilholio]

LoL only joking its all good.

Wow that is quick, mine should be here within a week hopefully then.

[foilholio]

I had a bit of a play with placing some reflex on one of my kites on the tips. It's seems you get much the same result placing it any where on the airfoil. Placing it near the leading edge gives the cleanest looking airfoil, middle or trailing edge seems to have slightly more effect, but hard to tell. It's interesting that you can kink the airfoil in such a way as had the bridles in that area been pulled, but they are of course not. Reflexing the airfoil a lot plays havoc with bridle tensions. A strongly reflexed airfoil is quite slow and loses a lot of performance. Didn't have time to test if I could get Autozenith working, but looks like it "might".

[kitexpert]

"Leading to a heavy kite that doesn't perform as well as others. So even the switch model has compromises. It compromises the large knowledge base a distributor network can provide." -plummet

I'm afraid average kiter's opinions of kites are not very useful for designer. I'm sure Hansen gets better information from Switch's pro teamriders. My own experience of Nitro's performance is different, for example it performs admirably upwind. That kite has very good L/D ratio.

When there is enough wind, say over 10 knots, any (modern) kite is not too heavy. Then lift is so much bigger than say 100g "overweight"/m2.

"Sumized to say as a lack of appreciation for lower weight in kites." -foilholio

Switch has a Helium as a low weight, low-wind kite. Nitro is solid 5 strut kite for general use and for higher winds. Compared to foilkites it is still lighter in flight, has less inertia. So, like any LEI, it turns and accelerates much faster. But of course high AR foilkites have higher L/D.