Ruth's Camera Kite | Process shots of the painting

The second layer of paint on this amazing quadline kite.

Ruth's Camera Kite | Process shots | painting first layer

This is the beginning of a quadline kite that is conceived of by Ruth Whiting and will be finished by Tim Elverston. This is on Cuben fiber and done with oil paint. We realized that we needed a way to chase the photographers that are always chasing us. More process shots to come soon.

Wing tip

Building a mini photon

Here is a time lapse of the final stage of building one of these little kites. This particular kite is sold to Scott Howlett - thanks Scott! I'm first putting clear reinforcements on the tips, then black fibrous reinforcement which gets hot-tack welded to prevent creep, and black bridle point circles. Then I hand bend the stainless fittings for each tip and fit and adjust those to the carbon frame, assemble the kite, and tie the bridle. This is nearly two hours of actual time with a photo taken every 5 seconds. Kite designed by Tim Elverston and Ruth Whiting of WindFire Designs. Carbon, spectra, cuben fiber, oil paint, stainless steel.

Clicking the HD button once the video is playing will increase the quality dramatically.

Painted cuben micro morpho

The painted mini morpho glider. I have made only one prototype that is blank. Ruth designed these graphics and this is number two. Shown here lying against a window patiently receiving her beautiful design.




Ruth continues to develop her style painting on cuben fiber. Here she is putting on the second layer of color after the first layer was dry. This is stuck to a window using water so that she can see in real time how the color will look when backlit. I will post images of the finished paint job in a few hours.

Foil design jig

I decided long ago that while computers are perfect for many jobs, they were not suited to accomplish the entire task of designing the foils that I wanted to fly and make for ourselves. While I do indeed use computers for much of the process, the core of the shape is done very like lofting a boat. These kites really are far too much work to be for sale, but this is how I sculpted them with a life-size model. This jig is used to to find the non-intuitive shapes of each cell. These were taken in 2001—hard to believe it's been so long.

Flying the MiniMorpho under the streetlight

Well, we really like this kite. Graphics come next, Ruth is excited. We were worried that it wouldn't glide, but luckily we were wrong. This thing almost flies itself.  We were getting 30 and 40 second runs with totally slack line.

Cuben MiniMorpho Glider | Snipits from the build

I built this very small cuben morpho glider last night. I haven't flown it much yet, but it seems like a lot of fun. There is a problem at this scale with the stiffness of the cloth, and I think this might come into play with this kite. We'll see.