How To Make A Rokkaku Kite

The template shown above represents one side of the kite sail. You will now transfer these measurements to the sail plastic.

Note: In order to fit the length of an 80 liter garden bag, I made this design shorter than a traditional 4:5:6 Rok of the same wing-span. You see, I'm trying to standardize on a 1.2 meter wingspan for all the Dowel kites!

• Firstly, take a large bag that you want to use for the sail, and lay it flat on the floor.
• Mark dots on the plastic which correspond to the corners of the Template. There is no need to use a T-square, or an extra-long ruler since any small errors in position will be duplicated on the other side of the sail.
• Using the marking pen, rule lines between the dots, as in the photo. For lines longer than the ruler, just add a few extra dots using one of the dowel spars as a ruler! Then it's easy to connect the dots with a ruler. It's probably best not to rule the whole line with the dowel, since it bends easily.
  

• Flip the plastic bag over, and trace over all the black lines using your marker pen and ruler.
• Cut out a rectangular section of the bag containing the kite sail, open it out and lay it flat on the floor - you can now see the complete sail outline, as in the photo.

• Lay clear sticking tape along all the lines, letting it overlap at the corners.
• With scissors, cut along all the black lines. This will leave most of the width of the sticking tape inside the sail outline. See the photo.