The kite, that I ended up calling Choris Aéra – greek for “no wind” (at least according to Google Translate) – did suffer from some issues. The general feeling was that it behaved a kind of, well, skittish, in the air and when pulling on the front lines, it didn’t accelerate like I wanted it to do.

So here the other day I decided to do some tweaks to the kite to see if the tweaks would improve the kite’s flight characteristics.

I was considering two significant modifications. First I wanted to adjust the sail geometry quite a bit and second I wanted to hem all the trailing edges to “get a better grip” in the air.

So the first thing I went about was modifying the sail geometry.

As you can see from the drawing above, the sail geometry is significantly modified. The BLACK outer (“diagonal”) trailing edge is the original one and the RED one is now the new modified edge. It’s quite easy to see the difference! 😉

I cut away a triangular piece of the sail and this cutaway made the down spar tip move closer to the centre of the kite. I of course also had to shorten the original down spar accordingly. This cutaway obviously also reduces the surface of the sail quite a bit.

The second modification was to hem all the trailing edges. I sew a narrow ripstop nonadhesive ripstop tape along the edges for hemming and – hopefully – tightening up the sail a little.

I was really curious to see if these modifications would have any impact – positive hopefully – impact on the kite’s flying characteristics, and I guess the only way to find out is to take it for a spin!