Well I've had the kite for a while now, flown it as much as I can and it looks like that'll be all that I can fit in for a bit. Given that no bugger else has said much on this subject....
Looking at the kite it does have quite a wide set to the standoffs and a wide turbo bridle too.
A little unusually the bridle attaches to the spine below the centre T
à la Prism's Zephyr. I'd love to know what this is meant to do on either kite.
As mentioned it came with 20g. of weight in the tail. I reduced that after a while for reasons that I'll go into.
I really can't say that I've taken to this kite very well. It doesn't help that it has virtually no
presence on the lines - almost no pull or feedback. Now I'm not looking for a kite to be able to support me whilst I lean back at 45°...... but I find it helps me when I can get a sense of what the kite is going through. Given that it's a quiet kite too then all I've got to rely on is what I see and sometimes I don't see straight. This is very much
my prejudice but it affects the whole experience for
me.
I found that I could get it to do
most "stuff" that I can do (after a while) but I was frequently overdoing the inputs or mistiming them. It seems quite eager to rotate (in all axes) and that lack of feedback really wasn't helping me moderate my pops and yanks. You really
don't need to muscle it about though. With the 20g. of added tail weight it pitched fast and kept on pitching even when I didn't really want it to any more. Cut back to 7ish g. it was better (for me) but it was still easy to lose if left alone for too long. Single pop, multiple rotation efforts tended to mess themselves up. I wasn't able to get a Flat Spin that I'd think worthy of the name and I
still couldn't pin down a really tight Fractured Axel-to-Fade - the Épée constantly rolled out immediately or pitched past the point where the Fade settles down. It's almost certainly in there somewhere but it's a little
knife edge for my my tastes.
A few times I did get quite a nice little sequence going but I found that what I was doing was hitting what I planned on until the kite wandered off a little and then I had to improvise around it to get it back fully under my command. The idea seemed to be to keep it moving with small, fast inputs and don't leave it alone for too long with slack lines.
All in all I think that the bridle~tail weight combination could do with some work to calm the kite down and make the performance more accessible. As it stands I don't think it has the repeatability that I'd look for in a commercial kite. Construction wise it's well put together but the tail weight simply looks out of place and the holes that the wingtip tensioning lines run through are showing signs of wear already. I don't know how much of a prototype this still is though.
With time on the kite and a dollop more talent
it'd be a nice enough kite but as it is it's firmly in the "try before you buy" camp.
HTH
Mike.