Soul v1 tips folding

[downunder]

Measured a few. As seen, are we 100% sure that Z lines shrink?

Same with A on tips. I see no evidence that the lines shrink on TE.

[Breze]

Have a closer look into the lineplans of V1 and V2.
The br1-12 are longer on V1. I didn't check the hole length of Z , but i guess V1 is 2-3 cm longer.

As written bevore , it depends also on the correct Reflex Profile. Esp at the short chord of the tips.
The momentum of the reflex turns the LE up. This is needed esp at low AoA, eg outer tip has no Z tension in turns. If Z but also C is too short the tip will come in.
It is possible to compensate with longer As at the tip, it will cost some performance . The airflow on the upper foil has to make a sharper curve if A too long or B too short.
This will cause an earlier turbulent airflow , that costs performance . But the LE won't get a frontal collapse with low AoA.
It's not very time consuming to try the compensation via Z pigtails , as discribed bevore. Totally irreversible, but i'm sure it will work well. Kite will be faster too.

[Smeagle]

In that case, I still think it's the bridle Did you try to stretch as I explained? Quite sure it will work for a while after that

[Breze]

Why stretching, if a permanent fix is easily accessible in half the time?

[edt]

It takes quite some time to pack the kite, it is not that porous.

when a kite gets leaky you don't even have to open the deflate flaps to roll up the kite. it deflates in seconds by itself. I think it took me 6 hours to measure all my lines of my soul 12 and put them in a spreadsheet. You want them in a spreadsheet so you can easily do calculations and compare the length of the lines all the way from the control bar to the kite for each attachment point. Not a fun task and in retrospect hardly worth it. For me it would have been better to sell the kite as "damaged" and buy a new one, but I learned a lot. It's possible some lines got stretched when you were pulling it out of the water.

[edt]

here's a snapshot of a tiny part of my spreadsheet the measurements are all in cm and you can see all the lines shrank by about 10 to 20cm.



You can see the entire kite shrank by about 5% pretty uniformly over the kite with the A and B's having the least shrink. The a's shrank by 10cm, b's 14cm, and the c's by 18cm and the z's by 16cm. This is quite a lot but if you subtract everything by 11cm which is how much the A's shrank, because after all it's all relative not absolute that matters it's 0 shrink on the A's 4cm on the B's 8 cm on the C's and 6 cm on the Z's. This is well within the capabilities of the flysurfer adjusters to handle. My kite has a lot of hours and wear, broke both of the B bulley lines, broke the pulleys too replaced them all snapped several lines several canopy repairs. Not sure of the exact amount of hours but it's a lot. Now you might expect that the wingtip Z lines shrink the most of all the Z lines especially the Z lines near the middle of the canopy, but I saw the br1 and br2 lines shrank by 18 and 17cm while the br9 and br10 right at the tip shrank only 14 and 15cm, so that was the opposite of what I expected.



In anycase after fooling around with this kite for countless hours, making all kinds of mods, I eventually threw out all my pigtails and just kept shortening the B and C adjusters until it flew properly. The kite was so leaky that when I landed the kite it layed perfectly flat before I even rolled it up. I eventually coated everything, adjusted the B and C mixer and now it flies properly.

What's the moral of the story? I guess while they do these little 1 or 2cm pigtails for racing kites for normal kiters it's not worth changing it until it's 3 or 4 cm off spec. It's a hell of a long ass job to measure all these lines, took me 6 hours at least and after all that I eventually just used the stock mixer no mods and adjusted B and C until it flew right by feel, not by looking at the markings.

Pretty much every problem that an old kite can have, my kite had it. Still I suspect it's possible that downunder's problem might be different. This bridle is relatively new, his kite holds air, but it still has wingtip folds, so maybe something happened when he dragged it on shore with a half ton of water, so maybe his kite has some other problem. Lot of trial and error for me that they don't tell you about in any of those smartly filmed videos by flysurfer. Once your kite is far away enough from spec you can't line up those long and short mixer things you have to do it by feel, or you can do like I did and measure every darn line.

my 12 is all old and beat up and was a chore to get right. my 10m by contrast is brand new and an absolute delight to fly, no adjustments yet after flying it hard all year. New kites are great doesn't matter if it's a tube or a foil

[rnelias]

Just an idea regarding sewing leaks. I think you could test it by using a fan pushing air in the intakes. Something to produce smoke could easily point leaking regions

[edt]

Just an idea regarding sewing leaks. I think you could test it by using a fan pushing air in the intakes. Something to produce smoke could easily point leaking regions

there's a video made by paragliders that shows you how to build your own pressure tester, it only requires a 2 liter bottle a bucket of water some tubing and a stopwatch. The next time my kites get leaky I'll do a proper pressure test and compare the leaks from the sewing vs the canopy. They did all the sciency things for you so it can be properly calibrated. If you still need to open the deflate valves when rolling up the canopy you are probably fine. My kite leaked out more air from the fabric and sewing holes than from the deflate valves before I sealed it up.

[edt]

by the way the the main reason you need a spread sheet is that when you measure a line you have to measure it all the way from the fabric of the kite down to the mixer. So you are finding ithe length for instance of a1 + AI + A-Main. You measure each of the lines by themselves but then to find out how it affects the kite you have to add up all the components.

[Ice101]

I have a sonic 3 13m ex FLYSURFER demo kite purchased last summer haven’t been able to use it much as the left side folds like that. Very annoying and waste of Kinsey. No one seems to be able to advise on a fix. Armin stated to try tightening the lines along the section that folds on the lcl’s but it wasn’t very specific as to which points you should do it in and how many. But too advanced for me. Wish someone like benni who designed the thing and understands it all would would advise on the issue properly.