Well, I got a nice surprise today. I was out front in the yard / workshop and my neighbor walks up to the end of the driveway. I see him walking by with his wife and little girl, pretty often. He says to me...
"Do you want some carbon fiber?"
HUH? So I drop the piece of starboard PTFE that I'm shaping and he puts a box of stuff down on the end of my driveway. OH MY GOD.
yards and yards of heavy 3-inch woven tape. A huge spool of linear roving. 30 feet of carbon tubing weave...and a bottle of epoxy and a bottle of catalyst!
I thanked him profusely...about 5 x and offered to give him something for it but he just brushed it off. Said that he used to make bamboo bicycle frames, but was out of it, now for years. This was the last of his stock that he'd bought off of ebay. So I just repaired the slit in the end of the carbon fiber assy pole, and made a reinforcing sleeve at the midpoint. I laid some 6-inch strips of the tape lengthwise, forward of the midpoint of the pole and then got two wraps of heavy carbon tape around the pole that overlapped those. Everything was wrapped with plastic wrap, and then blue painters tape went around all that for nice even pressure all 'round. That pole was already crazy strong, now it's insane.
Today, I also got a piece of shaped UHMWP under the shoulders of the eye bolt, at the end of the pole, which should limit the bending back-and-forth. I shaped a couple of pieces of starboard and PL-Premium'ed them to the side of the pole opposite the eye bolt that will hold the tack block for the assy. I'll put a small eye strap through it all, with a couple of machine screws and that will work for the bobstay. The difference between the load distribution of the eye bolt and the bobstay padeye is rather large, but I think it's all plenty strong enough. The eye bolt has a rated break strength of 1500 pounds, so a 600-700 pound load should be just fine. i can't see this kite pulling more than that in any wind I care to have it up in, so I think I'm good to go.
While I was at it, I also worked on the bottom of the rudder, fixing the lowermost trim tab bracket in place. It's now bolted down, now that I've let the wood in the rudder dry for over a week. Everything is sealed with epoxy, and there's some structural "fairing" ...if you can call it that, done with sawdust and epoxy. I'll be reinforcing the bracket with carbon fiber, since I now have oodles of it!
Last edited by AlanH; 12-05-2020 at 08:00 PM.
1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"