I've got a couple of race foil kites that are having some performance issues as they have racked up the hours. Have tried the usual tricks of adjusting mixer and some stretching in the bridle but still having some performance issues, namely when trying to light it up and head deep downwind at pace the kite won't light up and you have to go higher angle/less performance. So now I have started comparing parts of the kite to the line plans and finding some deviations. In wanting to do a thorough job and watching how the paraglider servicing place check their bridles I have decided to try somethign simlar and added up the line "check lengths" for each attachment point through to the mixer - kinda like a long mixer test but not just at one part of the canopy but at each attachment point. Before you think wow that's impossible, if you have a spreadsheet of the check lengths (sum of A1, AM1, ML1 and Main 1 for example and for each attachmnent point it doesn't take too long to measure each one if you have a measuring laser and the tables arranged right and a weight on the mixer end with the correct line tension for the measurement. So I have done these things, bought a laser measure for $40 and set it all up and have measured A and B rows on one side. So first question, has anyone else done this type of approach, I know i saw someone say they measured their whole kite line by line, but possibly not the entire length totals??
Anyway now I've done one side of the kite I can see some weird things. As expected B row has shrunk more than A row which hasn't shrunk much, but I can see two issues in the data. First one is that the wing-tips seem to have not shrunk as much as the centre part of the kite on both A and B rows (its a three row race kite- a Flymaax Boomv2). So i think i have to rectify this but i can't understand why that has happened and not sure if this is something that can cause this type of perfromance issue but i guess we'll find out by rectifying and testing. Also part of the A row- A9,10,11 are much shorter than the rest of the A row. no idea how this has happened but I'm pretty sure this is causing a deformation in the Leading Edge which is visible when flying creating a bit of a pronounced "shoulder" on the LE. So my plan is to create new bridle sections for A9,10,11 and also the wingtip areas to make the A row back to factory shape and same for B row. Then I'll adjust the mixer/make new mixer lines to make A to B to brake the correct ratios/bar position.
So I think I am on the right path with this but just wondering if anyone else has tuned foil kites in this way and wants to give some advice? Thanks in advance. When I am done I might make a youtube video about how I am tuning these race kites, its a bit time consuming but with racing its pretty necessary and I don't think many racers actually know how to do this and I think most paragliders aren't seeing the same kind of wear patterns that water foil kites are getting and especially minimal bridle race kites. I can also share the data once I have verfied it all but if anyone is interested in how this type of bridle data looks in a spreadsheet you can just google for paraglider servicign reports and see how this type of report looks with delta's/variances and adjustments and post-change variances etc. Cheers!