During the long hot summer of ‘99, I spent I don’t know how many days thinking and over 45 days building this fantastic three dimensional Brogden-Eddy called “Heavenly Bodies”. The kite is absolutely gorgeous, probably my finest sewing effort to date. Here it is, September, 2 weeks before the convention; and, despite my spending 2 days on the beach in Avalon, NJ tweaking; the damn thing just does not fly.
In desperation, with only 2 weeks before competition, I decided to build another kite, which came to be named the “Muncie Rush”. The kite is a stacked tri-D box inspired by Joel Scholz’s Kaleidakite, page 244 in Maxwell Eden’s “Magnificent Book of Kites”; and my earlier 1994 “Son of Woodstock”. The Son takes a crew of 4 about 2 hours to put together, and you gotta dig a three foot deep hole for an anchor to hold it down; therefore, the top criteria would be: it has to go together fast, and second, it has to be a reasonable size for a one person flyer. The design I settled on ended up being 6’ wide and nearly 9’ tall. I burned the midnight oil and built the skin in 9 days, 2 more days and it was completely finished, including the bags.
It turns out that the kite flies really great in 6 MPH to 20 MPH of clean wind. It does not like bumpy wind, probably due to the small side surface area. Although, in retrospect, I think a couple more cells on the bottom would increase stability. The nice part, it only takes about 10 minutes to assemble; , it needs no tie downs on the field, just let it lay flat till your ready to fly, then, give it a tug and up it goes.
Should you decide to build this kite, you will get really, really good at cutting out pairs of insignia re-enforcement’s (over 500); and, sewing on pockets (over 125).You will, however, have a really neat kite.