Cruelty to Stuffed Animals

I've been wanting to build one of these for a while, but I finally got around to it last Sunday.

It started when I was in high school. We'd just moved to Pennsylvania, and on the drive up we stopped off in Washington, DC. A week at the National Air & Space Museum wouldn't be enough time to see everything there, but the time I did spend there was great. On the way from Air & Space to the National Gallery, my mother stopped off at the museum gift shop and bought me a kite. It was a small parafoil. My first real kite since I'd stopped flying Gala deltas years ago.

By the end of the trip I was hooked. I'd flown it on the Mall, been pooped on by a sea gull, and within a month of moving in I'd flown it outside our house, at the Arboretum, at Valley Forge, and practically anywhere else that had enough space to launch. That really was when my love for kites took off, so to speak.

But it was the kids in my new neighborhood who really sparked my interest in doing things with kites. I was a shy kid back then, and in many ways I still am. I didn't hang out with my peers. I hung out with the younger kids because they still knew how to have fun, and they didn't tend to judge someone by what they wore or how "in" they were. And when they saw my kite waaaay up in the air the first thing they thought was, "How can we get it to drop something so we can catch it?"

I wasn't a machinist back then, but I could still make stuff with my hands. So I got some paperclips, bent them around with pliers, and made a little release catch I could attach to my kite line. It wasn't as elegant as, say, the KapKlips Brooks sells on his web site. But it functioned, and within the day I had a paper airplane hanging a few hundred feet up with a parachute sliding up my kite line ready to make it drop. The release worked! The plane flew! And flew and flew and flew. (We never did recover it.)

We dropped all sorts of things this way, but by far the favorite was tennis balls. Since the release catch was made from paper clips, all you had to do was run the clip through the fuzz on the tennis ball, and it was captured. Hit the release and it dropped. Whoever caught the ball "won" (though we never kept score.)

This naturally led to a desire to do KAP. We wanted to hang a camera from the line back then, but couldn't afford to. When I went to college I tried to find ways to pull it off, but didn't. Of course now I've not only put a camera on my kite, I've got a rig that lets me steer the camera, decide when to trip the shutter, etc.

So why not also return to the earlier idea of dropping things?

Recently my kids got a bunch of tiny stuffed animals maybe three inches long. Three dogs, one cat. I took one look and thought, "Hey, I bet I could drop those from a kite!" The idea isn't new. Several years ago I picked up a parachuting teddy bear from Into the Wind that was meant to be dropped from a kite line. But their release mechanism was terrible! In high winds it would release prematurely, in low winds it was too heavy for the kite to lift, and under any conditions by the time it came down it was almost always bent to the point of not functioning. I used it a handful of times and put it away in my kite paraphernalia box.

The real problem with most of these release mechanisms is that they're not really designed to be reloaded. The one that came with the bear was, but it didn't really work. About the same time I got the parachuting bear, I got a "popper", also from Into the Wind. It's a really neat kite-like thing that slides up a kite line, driven by wind power, hits the kite, collapses (with a "pop", of course!) and slides back down. So if I could design a release mechanism that could ride the line ahead of the popper, I was in business.

I wound up making it out of brass tubing. Not the lightest material in the world, but it lent itself well to the task. One large piece of tubing to ride on the kite line, and three smaller ones to accommodate the slide. A quick silver solder job joined the tubes together into a pretty indestructible assembly. The slide was made from a piece of 1/16" steel music wire. I had a whale of a time bending it into shape with my largest pliers. Even high wind is unlikely to mess it up.

And for the parachute? (Hey, even I'm not cruel enough to drop a stuffed animal without a parachute!) I pulled the parachute off the bear, made a harness out of some really thin elastic shock cord, and fitted out the first of the Sky Dogs.

Aaaaaand...

Here's where the story ends. Unfortunately the weather has been less than friendly, with low clouds and mists, rain, and high winds dominating the skies for the past few days. Here's hoping for a dry weekend with decent wind. I'll post more when the animals finally take to the sky.

Tom