Buggying with Deltas

The delta that WTG has in his sig is an HQ Delta Hawk (in that sexy red and black :wow: ) Upper wind range on it is supposed to be approx 38MPH. Kind of old school and no upper spreader. It along with a bunch of other HQ framed kites are built for power and speed. The average 2M kites are going to start going into shudders and fits slight north of 20-25 MPH depend on how they are framed.

This is an HQ Batkite


Like the Delta Hawk, top end in is 38 mph. North of 25 mph, 300lbs Spectra line will start singing and you find yourself leaning further and further back. Two battens silence the trailing edge so that almost none of the drama translates to sound. Never really thought about it for buggy use, but I could see it.

Nose plants could very easily translate to broken spars and torn sails though.

ITW Goliath, Premier Appollo, Level One Thor's Hammer, Elliot Mirage XL could probably all pull buggies, but the down side is that crashing and burning any of them at buggying speeds would almost certainly be a write-off.

I think the survivability factor would be much higher on something like the Revolution Blast/Blast 2-4/Blast. If for no other reason than reverse flight and dive stops are part of their natural repertoire.

Like Jeff said, the Q-Flaps might help, but as they were originally were designed for normal size dual lines.... I get the feeling that if you got something like and Apollo or Mirage fully cranked, the Q-Flaps would be like trying to stop a runaway bus by sticking paper lunch bags out the window. FWIW: The Mirage is framed in spars that could be used to fend off wild animals.... it's carrying a fair amount of momentum at speed.

ATB,
Sam

Delta's is pretty much where buggying actually got started. There are a couple pilots in our group that have been buggying for over 20 years. Most of them started out with a dual line kites from a company called "Top Of The Line" (aka: TOTL). TOTL built a bunch of kites, bu the most popular models were called the Hawaiian and also the North Shore Radical (aka: NSR). The NSR is a very loud and powerful wing that is absolutely awesome to fly. Just a few months ago, we were all taking buggy runs on my NSR at the park on our Friday Night Fun Fly. It was a blast and quite impressive how these 20 year old kites worked so well. Speed is absolutely amazing and upwind performance is every bit as good as today's high performance race foils. Dual line framed kites can be used no problem and do work quite well. They are not as good as the ram-air foils of today though and quad line gives much better control.

A little history (as I remember it anyways):
Framed kites were pretty much all anyone had to work with back then and were the only things that were somewhat controllable and actually worked well, but new designs with foils were being developed. Everyone used dual line framed kites until around the late 1970's, Ray Merry and Andrew Jones (from the UK area) came out with a kite called the "controllable flexible foil" which was named the Flexifoil kite. Ray Merry continued to advance the Flexifoil Kite design for a few years and then the design was sold to someone else to produce, Flexifoil turned from the name of a model of kite into the company we now know as Flexifoil Int.. Around the time of the late 70's / early 80's, Ted Dougherty designed the a new kite called the "Sparless Stunter" which was very effective and powerful ram air design that didn't use any spars or rods (the original Flexifoil kite still used a leading edge spar in it). The Sparless Stunter was (IMO) the birth of the quad line Ram-Air power kite market that we know today. Then in the 90's, Ted came out with the Quadrafoil kite - which also went from the name of a kite into a very popular brand company. Quadrafoil was responsible for models such as the Q series kites, the Competition C1, C3 etc.., as well as the XL, XXL (etc...) model kites. The Quadrafoil kites were some of the first kites to be elliptical and not square in shape. Also around 1991, Peter Lynn brought out the Peel and Ted Dougherty brought out a kite called the Quadtrac and sold it through a company named "Skynasaur". The kite was actually called a Quadtrac, but it was always referred to and wrongly called the Skynasaur. The Skynasaur can still be found in some groups. After that, the next really big boom was the Flexifoil Sky Tiger (designed by Ray Merry for Flexifoil "the company"). The Sky Tigers were the main staple in the kite buggy scene for many years.

The next biggest news for the power kite market was the release of the C-Quad by Peter Lynn. This kite came out around the mid 90's and was the first ever water specific design geared towards kite surfing. The C-Quad also proved itself as an awesome land kite engine and worked exceptionally well for buggying. In the late 1999 / 2000, Peter Lynn also released the ARC style kites which were designed for kite surfing but could be used in nearly any power kite sport. Ozone decided to get into the power kite market around this same time (early 2000). Their first introduction was the Little Devil series. Ozone is one of the leading paraglider manufacturers and transferred their paraglider knowledge into their kite designs which proved to be very positive. The strict tolerances and strength required to produce paragliders helped Ozone in their kite design and it shows with the quality of construction, durability and performance the Ozone kites have. Ozone's designs and knowledge has helped many other kite manufacturers improve their quality and performance as well.

Ozone also spearheaded the development of Depowerable kites with their release of the Ozone Frenzy in late 2004. Ozone also developed the leash-less safety re-ride system that is used by every other snow kite manufacturer today.

This is taken from memory so the dates and info may be off a bit....I need to get out of this office and go fly. If anyone can correct the info above, please do so.

Many thanks for the trip down memory lane Kent. Now I've got to go dig out that old Skynasaur catalog that's around here somewhere. It seems like years go by like minutes.

Thanks Corey for the input about the Flexi stackers and the RM Speed Foils. Both are basically the same kite designs although I have heard that the RM's tended to be a bit better in flight and the spar was better constructed than the originals. I haven't really done any side by side comparisons with the RM's and the original stackers to say so though. As mentioned above, the RM Speed Foils were produced by Premier under the consent of Ray Merry (his name is on the package).

Corey has been doing this much longer than I have and probably has forgotten more about the history of kites than I will ever know.

If it's the SpeedWing that I am thinking of, they are still available. Although a bit hard to get on this side of the pond without connections.

Where you might ask? Well, I am pretty sure most Peter Lynn dealers would have ready access to them. Why they can't have more picture of the entire kite on their web page still eludes me.

Oddly enough there are still some weirdos (the same folks that stay up late at night to watch the meerkat races), that would probably interested in adding to their platypus kite collection.

Asking price is a touch high, but I know where a mint (in color and condition) 10M Peel is hiding, if you are feeling nostalgic.

I really need to less time foraging on the 'net.



ATB,
Sam

That's actually how I first made contact with Angus (Coastal Wind Sports).

He still had one of the Flexifoil Punk (Pink) Series Kites listed on his site... and it was just a matter of time before I hunted down all the US stores that ever carried them.... Mwwwwwaaahhhhh.

Sadly, he had long ago sold out of them :sniff: , but still put CWS on my radar for later purchases.

ATB,
Sam

Got it !
Thanks Morrie!