Ripstop Nylon

An Ideal Kite Sail Material

This is just an overview of ripstop nylon, focusing on what it is and it's various uses. Particularly for kites of course, like that Delta down there! As far as history goes, there's not much to be found online.

Apart from the fact that this material replaced silk as the cloth of choice for military parachutes. That was back during WW2. The 1940s. Being synthetic, it was easy to produce nylon cloth in large volumes and thus production was cheap compared to using silk.

The World Of Ripstop

By the way, it's not limited to nylon, but let's stick to the topic at hand...

Nylon itself is used in a massive array of everyday items, so I won't even mention any here. You can probably think of a quite a few yourself, without doing any research at all!

Even the ripstop variety of nylon cloth has many, many uses in the 21st Century. This is not common knowledge, so I will list a few here....

• Outdoor gear such as tents and weather-proof covers.
• Colorful, light-weight and durable clothing. And accessories such as bags.
• Engine-less aviation sectors such as balloons, hang-gliders, paragliders and parasails.
• KITES! Thank goodness for that.

There wouldn't be much left if you took all the ripstop nylon away from a typical kite festival!

In a nutshell, this kite sail material is very light and very durable. Also, it is made with zero porosity which means air and water cannot penetrate it. It's almost like it was made for kites in the first place!

For some other applications, the porosity is not zero. Enough said.

Color The World, One Panel At A Time

These days, nylon kite sail material is dyed in the factory. Not painted. Hence many bright colors are available straight 'off the shelf'. However, it's still possible to home-dye plain ripstop nylon cloth. Some have even done a tie-dye job on their kite sail! Ah, the 70s...

Dye products from the Dylon company can be used to successfully and permanently change the color of the fabric. The process involves soaking the cloth in a hot but not boiling dye solution. Very thorough rinsing with cold water afterwards is necessary. Otherwise, any dye left on the surface could start to run, if the kite gets wet! OK I guess if all the panels are the same color, but otherwise it could really be a disaster.

Here are a couple of nice kite photos, representing the small and big end of the retail kite spectrum. I'm pretty sure they both employ ripstop nylon cloth! A small inflatable-sparred Sled on the left, and a positively giant sized inflatable show kite on the right...

Photo courtesy of Les Chatfield.

Photo courtesy of Mike Baird, flickr.bairdphotos.com.

A Word On Weights

The great majority of shop kites these days seem to use either 1/2 ounce or 3/4 ounce ripstop nylon. That's the weight per square yard of material. 1.5 ounce is less common, and there is even a smattering of other odd sizes like 0.6 ounce.

Hang on, why 'square yards' in this Metric age? To get more precise about it, in the U.S. they use ounces per "sailmaker's yard" which is 36 by 28.5 inches. The Brits use the standard Imperial yard. Finally, and most sensibly, the rest of Europe uses grams per square meter.

1 ounce American equals 1.26 ounces British and 42.8 grams per square meter. So when you buy a kite, the meaning of the cloth weight figure (if given) depends on the country of manufacture of the ripstop cloth.

We saw a Cody Box kite once at a kite festival, aloft in a very light breeze. Huh? Well, it was covered in 1/2 ounce ripstop nylon apparently, and I'm guessing it had graphite spars as well! Box kites ain't what they used to be.

Perhaps the massive kite-selling activity in the U.S. is the reason this non-metric measure seems to persist when people talk and write about sail weight.

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