ToddH

I hear you. My first ever outing with a dual-line kite (a brand-new Quantum) I hit the beach in a hard nose dive and broke the center T. Was surprised how easy it was to repair and after that haven't feared busting anything. I try to take good care of them, but don't mind them looking loved.

Wow. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful responses. In short, I've gone from "end of life?" to "good as new" in response to this thread. rporonga and several others nailed it right off the bat. Several of the c-clips holding the elbow connectors had come loose. The left upper was an inch low, left lower was 2 inches low and right lower was an inch or so high. I'm embarrassed that I didn't see this myself (it was obvious once primed to look at it). I had checked that the elbow connectors were flush against the c-clips but hadn't measured them for symmetry. I repositioned them to the factory positions, glued the c-clips in place and she looks to be good as new (minus a little Tedlar tape). The slack sail noted by Jon T (thanks Jim for emailing him) and Wayne was also remedied by moving the elbow connectors to the correct place. Thanks again to everyone.

Hello all. This is my first post on KiteLife. Unfortunately it's a repair question! I have about 40 hours on a Widow NG Special. It's been a great learning kite but seems to be nearing end of life already. The first is that the nose of the kite softened, for lack of a better word, such that one of the two leading edge spars tends to be pulled behind the other. Usually the right one is pulled back. This is probably easier to just see in the attached pictures. This was something of a problem from day one with the kite, and I noticed that the sail cutout around the center T tended to pull to the right as opposed to being centered. Initially this didn't seem to affect the flying characteristics, but now the kite tends to turn more easily to the left than the right, most detectable during tight spins. I think these shifts also misplaced the cloth patch protecting the sail from the upper spreader. The result is a tear in the main sail under the upper spreader, which seems to have compounded the problem above by throwing the kite even more off center. I've patched the hole with some Tedlar tape, but haven't flown it again since. Full disclosure: about 70% of this kite's flying time was on sandy beaches, and I've had it in the ocean as well practicing takeoffs and landings. Nothing too rough but lots of salt and sand, which I always rinsed off as best I could. I'm certainly more gentle now than I was at the start of those 40 hours, but I was well past the lawn dart stage during my time with this kite. I am curious as to whether this is an expected failure mode. Is there something I could have done to prevent it? Is there something in the set-up causing the nose to pull unevenly that I can still remedy? Cheers, ToddH