More on the Feather

So far my results with the KAP Feather are mixed. I flew in two spots with wildly different wind on two different days.

Day one was at Upolu Point in 20+ knot wind (closer to 22+ knot wind). I flew my Flowform 16 despite the wind speed, and managed to get good altitude, regardless of the thing "pulling like a truck" as Brooks Leffler described it. It's a good description! At the tail end of the flight I finally had to clip off to a fence post and walk the kite down with a carabiner. Even hand-over-hand, I couldn't get the thing down any other way.

I flew with the long pan axle, with and without the KAP Feather. In high wind like that, the KAP Feather tended to cause the rig to make small amplitude, high frequency oscillations. I put a lot of this down to tuning. The KAP Feather offers a lot of range for tuning simply by sliding the feather forward and aft on its central spar. I ran at full length, which was probably too much leverage for my rig.

Removing the KAP Feather resulted in larger amplitude, lower frequency oscillations. Pointing was still tough to determine, but the overall angular rate was lower, which resulted in fewer blurred shots. This is how I flew for the remainder of the day.

The second day was in my neighborhood, with Kona winds. These are typically more stable than the Trades we get here because the Trades tend to be stirred up from blowing over Kohala Mountain. Still, it made for a lot of oscillations, and I eventually took it off and flew without.

By the end of the day I removed the long pan axle from my rig and put the Picavet back on top of the pan axis gear box. Dang...

I'm not ruling out the KAP Feather. Far from it. I don't think I've given it a fair shake yet. But I also don't know if my digital KAP habits and flying requirements really jive well with it. I've already come up with a combination of camera settings and flying conditions that work well for me. I'll need to come back to the KAP Feather another time.

The jury's still out on my 4x5 camera, though. I do think it needs something along these lines to stabilize it, along with higher flying mass to offset its large cross-sectional area. There's a lot of exploration to be done along these lines. Only time will tell.

The incident tally for the day included one kite marked in a cat battle (rinsed, drying in my room now), one rig rolled about four times on the ground (thank goodness I got an extra set of Broox leg brackets!), and no real shots to show for it. Ah well.

Tom