Box Kites at the Core for this Flying Kites Design
Spend anytime at all on this site and you will come to the conclusion that there is just as much passion for designing flyers as there is flying them! Honestly, the most exciting and rewarding is when you personally have done all 3! You designed it, built it and then flew it! So, it should not be a surprise when the urge to design and fly a box kite goes from idea to action.
This blog post will follow the process of designing and building box kites. Follow along! When different build documentation or templates are ready, they will be made available, for free, here, so check back often.
The Inspiration
Sitting in the truck, listening to the radio and eating lunch on a rainy day, an idea or two popped up. Understanding what makes a kite fly in the first place, the thought was “can box kites have a tapered bottom?”. This sketch was drawn up and this project was born!
Another inspiration is to have a prototype built-up and ready to fly near the end of this month (April 2019) to show some local kids at a Fun Fly! Will be a scramble to hand build a few box kites for the kids to fly!
Gathering Materials
This is where we are at. To keep costs down for the prototype, we will build the frame with dowels purchased at Hobby Lobby. The material and thread we have ordered from Amazon from a favorite supplier of ours, Emma Kites. We will hand cut and hand sew all patterns for this prototype as well. Who knows, if it turns out to be a favorite flyer, we’ll get patterns made and find a qualified seamstress to help make more! Stay tuned for more on designing box kites!
All material has arrived for this effort, all that is needed now is some room on the design bench and some time. Look at the beautiful color options available for this project!
Initial Design
After collecting materials and sketching the initial concept, efforts to understand how the frame will go together and overall dimensions will be have been played out. Here are the initial specifications for this box kite. A Weight spec will not be listed until the prototype is complete. Framework dimensions are:
- Top Wing Span: 72″
- Bottom Wing Span: 50″
- Height: 72″
- Outer Box Width: 20″
- Inner Box Width: 8″
First, confession time. The weather has been beautiful and truthfully, not a lot of time has been spent indoors, because most free time is spent flying kites and many other flying machines! However, some experimenting with cutting material and hand sewing it has been done, and in semi-full transparency, we need some more practice! No pictures just yet, to embarrassing!
Another interesting thing which is being evaluated is the frame structure. So the reason is, a particular kite was purchased to fly for fun only, from a well known designer of box kites, and it was a complete failure. The kite was very difficult to assemble and then, failed to launch and actually broke in several places around the frame. It was a major disappointment! This kite will be used as spare parts and evaluated on things ‘not to do’!
Sewing is not for everyone!
Ok, who said sewing was going to easy by hand, or even possible. While on one of many kiting adventures to South Padre Island for the summer, the sewing needle was brought out in an attempt to sew the modified box kite frame. After all, the adventure was a kiting adventure, so it only makes sense to work on this prototype! EPIC Fail! After many hours of laboring, the effort was abandoned. Not all was lost though, as it turns out, packing tape works great! There is now tearing down afterwards, so rather than tape this giant kite together, a small SLED kite was designed, fabricated and flown. There will be a video or two and some pictures in a future post.
One other note of interest is, the clear tubing that was to connect all the sticks together was simply to flimsy. Dihedral cross supports were also needed, so the parts are on order to build this one right. Well, except the taping of course! It will be worth it in the end!
UNCLE!
Yes, crying Uncle is at times, the right thing to do. This particular effort is put on hold until a few things have been accomplished. They are:
- Design a simpler kite and get it flying. Will stick with the box kite theme, but a much smaller one. One that can be hand built.
- Find a seamstress and also learn how to sew. It is obvious, good kite designers know how to sew.
- Lastly, wait for the Fall / Winter design cycle. Lets be honest here, not much time is on the bench right now because it is all spent outside flying!
The Hand-built, Simple Box Kite Design
This simple box kite will be 36″ tall. this height was picked so off the shelf dowels from the local Home Depot can be used.
The crossbars. 4 crossbars were made, each approximately 18″ long. Instead of using kite string to wrap around the sticks to keep them secure, a trick was found using 5/16 Inner Diameter tubing. Each tube is cut approx 1″ long, with a slit cut in the middle half way through. This can be manipulated to hold two sticks together. See the below images:
The Frame Up:
First build frame up is complete. Here are are a few pictures of this box kite all framed up and covered. As a reference, we followed overall dimensions as described in this article.
Final Flight: sadly, this box kite did not survive more than 3 flights. As with all box kites, when the wind is lost, it looses altitude quickly. The rough landings did not fair well. Unfortunately, no pictures or videos were taken of the 3 flights. Bummer.
We will return to our next attempt at a box design soon! If you just one for the beach, grab this one!
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