2-Skewer Sode Kite

Bridle Sorted, Sode Soars to 350 Feet

During an earlier outing with the redesigned 2-Skewer Sode kite, the 3-leg bridle was a disaster. With a single attachment point near the nose of the kite, the upper horizontal spar flexed too much and made the kite wildly unstable.

MBK 2-Skewer Sode

So, for today, the bridle was swapped around. This put two lines onto the upper horizontal spar and one onto the vertical spar, close to the middle of the kite. This arrangement has given great results with the 2-Skewer Rokkaku—another kite which employs two horizontal spars of equal length.

Sodes have a square shape near the tail end, which is a natural fit for attaching a looped tail.

Not only are looped tails more effective for the same amount of material, but they are also more compact and hence convenient to handle. They are just half as long in the air.

This new sode is a return to the traditional proportions, compared to the somewhat longer 2-Skewer Sode that you might have spotted in older photos on this site.

I'm not sure how traditional a looped tail is though!

Winds were much lighter and smoother this evening, compared to the first outing. On that occasion, the sode was trying to fly in rough air which was gusting well into the moderate range.

Also, the field I was flying from this time had a lot of open country in the upwind direction. There were very few trees or houses, and the open ocean was just a few kilometers beyond that. This was more convenient for launching kites!

After launching it was immediately apparent that the 2-Skewer Sode kite was more well-behaved than previously, even taking the lower wind-speed into account. With 30 meters (100 feet) of line out, I lost no time in whipping out the camera and taking quite a few photos.

It was late and the sun would be losing much more brightness pretty soon. For kite photography, the more natural sunlight strength the better! There was some low-level cloud about and quite a bit of cirrus up much higher. But there was still plenty of sunshine to light up the sail.

Since the wind speed was so light for most of the time, the kite took to bobbing left and right as it struggled to maintain height. At least one photo should show it in a reasonable pose with the tail flowing out straight behind.

There was plenty of room upwind across the grassy field. So I took advantage of that to walk back and get the kite up higher, letting line slip out as I went. Soon the bright-orange sode was pulling slightly stronger in the couple of extra kph of wind speed that was up there.

Around this time a passenger jet went overhead at several thousand feet, having taken off from Adelaide airport a few minutes earlier. The 2-Skewer Sode kite was still not quite comfortable with the low wind-speed, so the side-to-side rocking continued. However, now and again, a gentle gust would come through. The few extra kph tended to smooth out the kite's motion, resulting in stately climbs with a motionless tail loop hanging below.

Aren (7) took the line and felt the rather light pull and said so. Perhaps he was remembering the firmer tension of some of the Dowel Series kites, which have four times the sail area, on average.

The modest-sized sode kite was achieving a little less than 45 degree line angles today, due to lack of wind speed. Or was it—see the end of this report! I ended up letting the 20-pound Dacron line out to 120 meters (400 feet). That would make the kite very small in a camera lens, at that distance. Despite the wind being a little less than ideal in strength, this flight was turning out well. There's nothing like seeing a homemade kite do its thing way up there!

It seemed that the 4SL (length of four skewers) looped tail was only just enough. The 2-Skewer Sode kite really would fly better with a little more plastic dragging away at the air behind. I might recommend a 6SL length in the instructions.

Aren volunteered to bring the kite down. Off he ran, toward the kite, running the line under his hand. I wound in as well, since the kite could come down over roofs at the current length! After a few minutes the kite had flopped to the grass.

A good long-and-high flight it was, with the photos and video taken in good lighting. This was an achievement, considering the amount of cloud cover and rain we have been getting around here lately!

Just on impulse, I put the sode up again for a few minutes, with the bridle knot adjusted lower by a few mm (1/4 in.). This time, the kite line surged over 45 degrees and stayed there! See what a small bridle adjustment can do.

Finally, I picked up the wind meter which had been parked on a flat post-top the whole time. The reading was an average of 3.1 kph, gusting to 9.2 kph. And that gust was probably recorded not long after we arrived.

As mentioned earlier, there's more kite-making info here than you can poke a stick at :-)

Want to know the most convenient way of using it all?

The Big MBK E-book Bundle is a collection of downloads—printable PDF files which provide step-by-step instructions for many kites large and small.

Every kite in every MBK series.