No Box Kite PlansJust Everything You Need To Know To Make One!
I don't have a set of box kite plans or blueprints for you, or instructions telling you step-by-step how to make a box kite. But a basic square box kite is quite a simple piece of construction. Just by looking at the picture over there, you can see all the components. In particular, notice the crossed sticks near the top of the picture. Look closely, and you can see that they are attached inside the kite where the orange part of the sail material wraps around the long rods. There's a blown-up picture of that detail a bit further down this page. Let's call the 4 long rods to which the sails are attached the 'main spars'. The stiffer and lighter the main spars are, the better. Same for the 'cross sticks'. Some materials specified in box kite plans include...
Besides the cross sticks already mentioned, there's another pair of them hiding inside the blue band at the other end of the kite. So that's one pair near each end, a tight fit which stretches everything taut and makes the whole box kite rigid. That's important. That cross stick is perfectly straight by the way! It looks crooked, but that's just the colored background doing that. An optical illusion. There are 2 ways to connect the ends of the cross sticks with the main spars. Either make a small dent or hole in the main spar, and sharpen up the cross stick so it neatly fits into the spar. Otherwise, notch the end of the cross stick so it neatly fits over the main spar. This works ok with wood, where friction holds it in place. The sail material needs to be attached to the main spars somehow. Some box kite plans specify gluing the spars directly to the sail material. Otherwise, small pockets need to be stitched or taped onto the material. The spars then slide through these, before the cross sticks are inserted to tension up the whole kite. Of course, sail material for any kite needs to be reasonably light, strong and airtight. Some examples of sail material that you might find in published box kite plans are...
Finally, the simplest way to attach a flying line is to secure it onto one of the main spars. Right next to the yellow part of the sail, see the blown-up picture to the left there. I've added a black line to represent the flying line.Box kite plans often specify a 'bridle' as another way to attach the flying line. This can be a length of slightly heavier line attached at both ends of one main spar, with a loop tied into it to attach the flying line. The correct point to locate the loop will be somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the length of the bridle, in from one end. The nice thing about this basic design is that you can remove the cross sticks and the whole kite is easily transported. It becomes just a long thin bundle of sticks and cloth. Can you imagine anything more cumbersome and fragile than a large glued-together box kite? Even a medium sized one wouldn't be worth the trouble. Very Small Box KitesHere's an interesting idea, and one that I'm going to explore a bit in future, just for fun. Very small box kites are easier to keep rigid. With some materials and building techniques you don't actually need those tricky cross sticks. I say 'tricky' since they have to be accurately made to work properly. Too short, and they might fall out when the kite flexes. Too long and they won't even fit to begin with!Anyway, back to tiny box kites. Small slabs of styrofoam can be glued together to form the sails, before gluing light weight wooden doweling to the inside corners of the styrofoam. This idea has worked for some people. After it's all glued together, you could try rounding off the edges of the styrofoam using some sandpaper. This would reduce drag forces a little and help the kite to fly better. Even so, I don't think this would be a light-wind kite! In theory, balsa wood could be used in a similar way. Do you have any aeromodelling skills? Have a go at making a little balsa box kite, it should work fine. Particularly if you carve a bit of an aerofoil section into the sails! More than just decreasing drag, this would also increase the lifting force of the sails. Try it using using thick slabs of the lightest balsa, to get some rigidity. Some people are into very tiny kites. In fact, there is at least one competition that I'm aware of that let's people compete for making the smallest flyable kite! Balsa wood would be ideal for making really tiny box kites. Ones that would use ordinary sewing thread for fly-line, perhaps! I have some ideas for making extremely tiny kites, but won't publish any such box kite plans here until I make one or 2 and prove that they fly! More Complex Box KitesA quick browse around the web will show you that the name 'box kites' these days can be applied to an enormous range of multi-celled kites. Some of the individual cells might look something like a simple box kite. You'd have to be pretty keen to build one of these from a set of box kite plans!Most of these 'cellular' kites are bought almost-ready-to-fly from kite shops or other outlets. About Box Kite PlansIf you do manage to come across some specific plans or box kite instructions, remember that these kites scale very well. In other words, if you double the dimensions of everything, you will have a kite that flies just as well as the original design. Don't forget to double the diameter of the spars and cross sticks as well.This bigger kite might pull like a horse though! You would need line that takes 4 times the strain specified in the plan, since you have just quadrupled the sail area. In a similar way, you could perhaps divide everything by 4 and end up with a neat little box kite that fits in the glove-box of your car! Doing the maths again, that kite would only need flying line with a sixteenth of the breaking strain specified in the instructions. Of course, you can also scale a set of box kite plans up or down by just a small percentage, say 15 percent. Line strengths could then stay the same, since there won't be such a huge difference in sail area. MBK Flying Skewers And Plastic is a fun publication for single-line kite lovers. Learn how to make a new kite every month! Subscribing to this FREE monthly newsletter has to be the easiest way to keep in touch with what's happening on this website.
Last updated: 12 Oct 2007 Return to Box Kites from No Box Kite Plans... All the way back to Home Page
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Over on the left there is a blow-up of the relevant part of the picture. You can easily see where the cross sticks attach to the main spars. 