FS Soul Bridal Wear

[RomeUtah]

Anyone have experience of premature bridal wear. My 15m has suspicious amount of wear on the back main lines after a little more than 100 hrs of flight. Am I paranoid at discoloration and sponginess of the lines?

[Nem0]

Some pics would help...

[RomeUtah]

will try to get some pictures up, but the line is basically a little fuzzy with some discoloration on the side of the loop where the line goes from double the thickness to single thickness

[FLandOBX]

Anyone have experience of premature bridal wear. My 15m has suspicious amount of wear on the back main lines after a little more than 100 hrs of flight. Am I paranoid at discoloration and sponginess of the lines?

Are you referring to the yellow pulley lines? I have broken 2 of them on my FS Soul. The point of wear and eventual break is in the pulley contact area. I'm trying to "service" my pulleys more often now and may replace all of them soon. I haven't experienced line wear in any other areas of the bridles.

[jorg]

IMHO the green/yellow lines and pulleys are a piece of shit. I don't use them anymore as I couldn't get one season out of them. I use 2mm Dyneema and pulleys from 2012 Best, going solid. For me, the problem was the drums of the pulleys. They were so low quality, they broke or had hair cracks that would speed up the line breaking process even faster.
I am wondering if we could try metal pulleys instead just to avoid wear & tear.

[FLandOBX]

See pp. 77-78 of the Flysurfer Soul thread for some ideas on pulley replacement. You can usually see wear on one side of the white plastic pulley drum when it begins to eat at the lines. You can also tell if a pulley is worn out by pushing and pulling the drum in and out of the pulley frame.....if it moves back and forth noticeably then it's probably done. I haven't decided on the best replacement option, but I agree there has to be something better.

[PrfctChaos]

The Ronstan pulleys used by Ozone is excellent in my opinion. Will be replacing Flysurfer peak pulleys with those when the time comes.

[Trent hink]

The older Flysurfers used Ronstan kite blocks, I think, or something similar. My Peak 4s have something similar, but I know it is not Ronstan..

I went through a few sets of those pulleys on my Speed 1s.

Lots of other kites use those pulleys or something similar.

They last way longer if you can manage to rinse and dry them after every session.

Little bits of sand that get into the sheave are what wears it out.

And I recall that I have more than once used a hammer and a small punch to remove the pin and just replace the sheave.

The block never wears out, except in case of extreme failure.

Usually just the sheave wears out, but it is not real unusual for the pin to be shot too.

Much easier than messing with fitting a new block... as long as the parts are compatible.

It's normal to see a bit of pale discoloration where the pulleys are running on the bridle lines, but the bridle lines will last the life of the kite as long as you keep the pulleys in good condition.

[PrfctChaos]

The older Flysurfers used Ronstan kite blocks, I think, or something similar. My Peak 4s have something similar, but I know it is not Ronstan..

I went through a few sets of those pulleys on my Speed 1s.

Lots of other kites use those pulleys or something similar.

They last way longer if you can manage to rinse and dry them after every session.

Little bits of sand that get into the sheave are what wears it out.

And I recall that I have more than once used a hammer and a small punch to remove the pin and just replace the sheave.

The block never wears out, except in case of extreme failure.

Usually just the sheave wears out, but it is not real unusual for the pin to be shot too.

Much easier than messing with fitting a new block... as long as the parts are compatible.

It's normal to see a bit of pale discoloration where the pulleys are running on the bridle lines, but the bridle lines will last the life of the kite as long as you keep the pulleys in good condition.

Just to be clear. The current pulleys on the Flysurfer peaks (likely the same on the soul, but I don't know) look like the top pulley in below photo.

While the Ozone pulleys look like the bottom pulley. The pulley lines for my little peaks (1 year old) is in a much worse state and pulleys are more difficult to turn, than my 2.5 year old chrono. So from my experience would definately prefer the bottom type.

Capture.PNG (158.01 KiB) Viewed 1581 times

[Foil]

The pulleys on the ozone range of foil kites are the ones shown above, the more robust looking ones, their called Orbit pulleys, found at most good yacht hardware supply outlets, they are much more expensive as you would expect, but they last.
And the best feature over the super cheap flysurfer ones is the fact you can easily check that the spinning inner wheel is running free by just flicking it loose to spin with just your finger tip and see and hear it whirr around, and if sand is jamming it I just knock the two pulleys together a few times and flick the wheels around again, you simply can't do the same with the cheap flysurfer ones as the wheel sits just below the shoulders, so you need to pinch the bridle line tight around the wheel to unjam it, and then it's not a good free spinning wheel, very poor IMO, I have used both and why they use these mega cheap bits of kit on what is a basic safety concern, beggers belief,
Not sure the stainless steel ones are the way to go on foil kites as the weight of these tiny pulleys is enough to cause them to thrash around if the lines are blowing around and then cause tangles too easily, it used to happen on the minimal bridals of old Lei kites that I used them on for a while.