Kite Ideas
By Steve Gillman(Stories From The Cabin - Part Four)
My kite ideas (and the kites I made) were mostly for entertainment. I was living in a cabin on Lake Michigan as a young man. I used garbage bags, old yardsticks, and tape of whatever sort was available to make the kites - I didn’t have the money for better supplies, and there were no stores around nor did I have a car to get to one. Heavy duty fish line was all I had for for kite string.
Delta-wink kites seemed to work best. In fact they continued to fly even after my friend Bruce (who visited on weekends) had shot them full of holes with a bow and arrows. That is a great target practice game by the way.
The fishline gave me the idea to make a kite I could fly with a fishing reel. I made paper airplanes, tied them to the lighest line I had, and they made it to about fifty feet high - just over the tops of the White Cedars that filled the forest behind the cabin. When I was ready I just reeled them in.
The large delta-winged kites caught a lot of air, and I had to really hold on. They broke the fifteen-pound fishline more than once. I wondered if I could put a harness on one and fly a cat in the sky. Fortunately I didn’t try that one.
Another idea I had was much more practical: A kite for pulling a boat. I actually did let the kites I had pull the old row boat out in the bay once or twice, but they couldn’t move it too fast. A large para-sail stlye kite that needed no kite sticks would be best for this. It could be packed small with a hundred feet of strong cord, and used in emergencies to pull a boat to safety.
Like many of my ideas and mental inventions, I imagine this has already been done a few times. It would only work to pull a boat downwind, but maybe with as much as ninety degrees of steering if you had a rudder or paddle to use as one. It would be much simpler than an actual sail.
Later in life I had the idea to use kites for advertising. Again, this has probably been done, but I haven’t seen it yet. Nobody owns the sky, and as long as you flew the kites below the level where the FAA would get involved, I think you might be able to fly them all day over ourtdoor events, beaches and crowds, charging by the hour and projected viewership for each ad carried on them.
By the way, here is one last kite idea for you to try. The next time you have a kite high in the air in a stiff breeze, wrap a paper plate around it in a cone shape, with the big end towards the wind, and tape it that way. Let it go and it should slowly climb the string up to the kite. That one was not my own idea, but one I modified from something I saw once.
My ebook:
| Are You Lucky?
Take the Luck Test and find out. |
Tags: cabin, kite ideas, paper airplanes