Had to keep the kids occupied during the school holidays and was wondering what to do when we stumbled across a delta kite design from MyBestKite.com. Naturally, we chose a simple design to see if the designs were any good. The simple delta kite looked like a great candidate - easy enough to build and a different from the paper and bamboo diamond kites I used to fly as a kid.
Sail material was cut out of some lightweight garbage bin liner bags. We used white correction tape to mark the sail outline on the black plastic material. A couple of 3mm square section wooden sticks and 6mm dowels were purchased from Daiso. These were cheap but cut from soft wood. It did not take much force to break them. And in fact, the horizontal spreader snapped on the kite's maiden flight... Dude built up the tail by tying together strips of black garbage bag plastic.
With the kite completed, we piled into the car and headed to East Coast Park. There was a decent breeze and the delta kite took off effortlessly. Several gusts of wind snapped the horizontal spreader and sent the kite and crashing into the sea. No worries. We salvaged the kite, lashed the remaining dowel with some 3M scotch tape and sent it up again. Definitely a robust design!
Our confidence bolstered by the success of this first attempt, we decided to take on The MBK Dowel Delta.
Tools needed to splice Daiso 6mm square dowels into longer spars. Daiso dowels are 910mm long. The MBK requires 1200mm long dowels for the leading edge spars. The splice overlap was 40mm and so the extension was cut to a 330mm (well, I was half asleep and cut it to 290mm...).
Mark out the notch with a good old fashioned pencil. Start removing unwanted wood with a penknife. Stop before you hit the line. If you're a first timer, stop well before the line.
Once you have a pair of dowels whittled down with the penknife, finish the notch by filing with a rectangular profile metal/wood file. Use a coarse file or you will take forever to finish this. Here's a tip: line the two notches so they are side-by-side and file them down together. Check if you've removed sufficient wood by fitting the two pieces of wood end-to-end. Do this more often as you approached the marked out lines. Unless you have really precise markings, go slow and check often! You don't want to have to start over. I had to make 4 of these joints -- one on each leading edge spar and two on the horizontal spreader (for symmetry).
Light coloured plastic bags are a little harder to come by at the local supermarkets. Using correction tape to mark out kite sails isn't exactly economical either. So we got ourselves a white paint marker pen from the convenience store. This marker performed beyond our expectations. Remember, it's a paint marker. White lines that you lay down with this pen are more opaque than the black plastic of the trash bags. What's the big deal, you ask. The big deal is that the opacity allowed us to mirror the sail outline about two halves of the folded sail material by shining a torchlight from the bottom. Markings from the first half cast a shadow that guides you as you lay down dots. To keep registration between the two halves, cut down the plastic sheet to about 5cm from the outline before you transfer the trace from the first half. Staple along the edge every 5 to 10 cm. This will keep the halves from shifting with respect to each other as you trace along to transfer the outline to the second half.
Credit where credit is due! Thanks to Tim Parish for sharing his designs on MyBestKite.com. If you're a parent thinking of spending some time with your kids, visit Tim's website and try building one of his kites. They really work!
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