Sat Nov 23, 2013 5:27 pm
Ara,
As someone who has spent years struggling first to do the lazy and nowadays the multi-lazy, perhaps it would be helpful to add my penny-worth.
Take an assembled kite, and in still air hold it in your hands in the deep turtle position (say spine at 45 degrees to the horizontal), and let go so that it drops.
- I expect that what you'll find is that the kite tilts its nose upwards as it floats downwards. I suspect that this is what happening to you when you give the kite lots and lots of slack from nose-up flying position. First the kite flies in an arc (about a horizontal axis) with the nose falling backwards into a turtle. Then when the kite has lost most of its momentum and is floating with the wind, and gravity takes over, the nose starts coming up again until the kite is flying with its spine close to horizontal.
So how to maintain a deeper turtle/backflip position? Back to the assembled kite held in your hands in the deep turtle position. This time, instead of just letting go, throw the kite in a horizontal direction, trailing edge first. (i.e. to simulate pulling on the lines while the kite is in the backflip). I expect you’ll find that while the kite is moving backwards in the direction of the initial throw, the kite rotates into a deeper turtle.
It’s a bit of a balancing act to keep the kite in turtle from the initial backflip– have to catch the lines at the right moment and apply the right amount of tension. – I can only claim to have this partly sussed. (The partial bit is a long story involving trying to maintain altitude and working on the lifter – perhaps something for discussion in a later posting.)
Anyway, let’s suppose the kite has been backflipped and you are holding a deep enough turtle for a lazy susan. I find that just pulling one line for the lazy at this point is bad. The kite may pull out of the backflip, or won’t rotate all the way round. Instead either: from normal flight do an uneven backflip (that is releasing tension on line slightly before the other) or maintain the backflip with uneven tension, until one wing (the one on the side that is to be pulled for the lazy) is nearer you. I feel I start pulling harder for the lazy roughly when the leading edge of the side is pointing back to a point over my head.
If you try to the above, please let us know if (and how) it works for you.
(As you can see from the posting times, I wrote the above while Ara you were writing your last posting. - Congratulations on getting the lazy to work. For the record, while I find I can do the above with most of my kites, recently I have practiced most often with an Ocius SUL in very light winds [~0-3mph].
Going immediately from the backflip to the lazy does work for me too, but I feel that what is going on is that the line tension for the lazy stops the kite leveling out in the backflip, similar to applying tension to both lines to maintain a deep-ish backflip before doing a lazy.)