Forecast looked ok for the PM and as it was our last day here, thought we'd just relax at the beach anyway. Got there about 4pm to SFA from the SW . . . changed then slowly picked up to lookin' good from the NW.
Went out about 5pm and had a pretty nicely powered session! Good power to nicely over in the gusts, to just under in the lulls. Only came in cos the sun was setting.
Tried out the Xcaliber and Tronic for a good few minutes . . .
Xcaliber is awesome on flat water, feels really locked in but may be too stiff in the chop - tended to get bounced around if you weren't on the ball.
Tronic is too narrow at the tips - constant spray on the back leg (but none on the front and into the face?!) and tougher to go upwind. Wonder if I shouldn't just go for the XL size :( Tough call now . . .
Again, up early and out to Nathon. Best light wind session so far, riding upwind ok most of the time. A few silly jumps and stunts but I still want more wind!
Had to go to Osaka for an annoying visit to a mendacious clinic, so hauled ass back to Shiga to see what was what on the lake about 4:30. Turned out, not very much but Junkie Sensei was doing OK so I trotted back to the car to gear up...
Run, fat-ass, run!
Into the suit, no time for boots or gloves! Light wind out there, so I took the P4 19 and the Flite over to the lake. Wife was with me so she carried the camera... and got some footage of me faffing around.
Well, it's bloody light. The occasional white cap and foot-high chop... Junkie Sensei is going upwind ok though, with his Turbine. Time is of the essence so I unfurl the Psycho4 19. It's due for a test run since I set the mixer to 0 -0.5 -1 (I think) and this'll be the first time out since it went over the trees (also I think). Barely enough wind to inflate it, so it's going to be a messy launch. And it is...
But it get up and it's pulling ok... might get some downwinder walks in though. Out onto the water...
Ride, fat-ass, ride!
Crikey! Actually feeling a little freaked out by just how grunty it is in the "gusts", as I take off like a rocket and struggle to edge against the kite, then realize I probably haven't checked the relative line lengths. Trim it some to cope... Well, going upwind is easy! Kite seems stable too - let's play! Edge it and send it...
Fly, fat-ass, fly!
Woof, not bad! Nice jumps for such light wind, I'm amazed! Back-rolls are big and floaty. Front-rolls are off though... man, for a non-light wind kite the 19 is actually doing rather well in the light wind! I clown around some for the camera... then the wife wimps out cos it's cold. Junkie Sensei has gone home, so I'm all alone.
Drop the kite once, and it lays on the water tip-on-tip, with a bit of a bend in the middle... think I'm going to have a swim, cos when I start trying to work it out, it makes like it's not going to open up at all in this light wind. I try an arc-style recovery and manage to open the center of the kite and get it LE down, but it'll only rise a meter or so off the water. Drop a line and it comes around - phew!
Swim, fat-ass... no not this time.
Enjoy myself for a bit longer, but the sun has set behind the hills (although it's still light) and the wind has dropped - I'm having to work hard and careful to get back upwind. So I call it a day... 90 minute session, which I wasn't expecting and was amazed to be riding at all! Good ol' Flysurfer!
Movie coming... eventually.
Moment of the day was what felt like a massively high back-roll :) Mood of the session was wha-? whoa! It sucks when you fly the kite wrong.
Weather was reported as 4–8 knots, gusts no more than 12 (2am)! 17˚C at 44%... Wind felt like 10 to 15 knots
What I learned today...
• The P4 19 is a beast. Seems sensitive to it's state of tune though.
• Big ol' back rolls are easy. Like, as big as a regular jumps big. Yikes!
• Don't need gloves or boots when it's been 17˚C all day.
• Front-rolls need more commitment and skill than on the Flite.
• Don't dive the kite straight down after a jump - riding towards it and sheeting out is what causes the tip-to-tip clamming.
• If you go for a down-loop transition, when you redirect the kite sheet out to send it right across the window, and when you can feel it start to pull from the side, haul on the bar for the loop. Makes a big fat loop with more constant speed and pull, with much less faffing with the bar.
• Really seems to me that Flysurfers need a firm hand on the bar...
• Gotta go over it again and check the lines.
Also known as the thrust-bearing mod. The following video from 10 seconds on shows the goal of what we want to achieve ...
Stock bar uses a big brass washer (BBW) and then a jam nut on a nyloc nut to hold it all together. The problem with this is that it doesn't rotate very freely so although the bar is cleverly designed so that, after a rotation, you untwist the flying lines by spinning the bar then untwist the double depower rope when you sheet in. Unfortunately, the tension on the BBW et al is such that the depower rope gets chewed up - if you use it in the appropriate method. You can untwist by hand but that sucks.
Here's an exploded view of Holden's needle bearing mod. It shows the setup nicely. The CL is connected to the black thing, the red hat and spring go onto the T-tube that has the double depower line looped around it.
Melting candle wax into the line (more on that at a later date, perhaps) helps keep it slippery; grease or other gunk down there is an option too but washes away and perversely attracts gunk and grit. IMHO the best option is simply to make the bar spin more freely.
Various teflon washer, ceramic or needle-bearings have been suggested but the greatest results have been obtained from using thrust bearings such as the MTBS-816 from here http://torquetrans.com/thrust-bearings/ss-metric-thrust-bearings.mgi ... be aware that they ONLY use UPS and shipping 1lbs (454g) of 8 sets to Japan was going to cost me $85 :D For $12, I got them to ship to a buddy in the US (thanks stetson!) and he sent them here ... for $2.59.
The problem - kinda - comes in putting it all together ... I went a bit mad with my digital calipers trying to work it all out.
Originally, the BBW + jam nut + nyloc nut = very close to 15mm. Breaking it down, the BBW is 0.75mm, jam nut is 6mm and the nyloc nut is 7.5mm.
The thrust-bearing stack (washer-bearing-washer) is 5mm tall. If you try to use the original stainless steel nyloc nut, you have to find a 1.5mm jam nut! Obviously no good.
You can't ditch the BBW cos it covers the pin that holds in the CL. And it's an odd diameter, something like 23mm so if you wish to drop a washer from the bearing stack and use a big stainless washer, then you - or rather, I - have to grind down a big stainless steel washer (BSSW) of 25mm diameter and bore a hole in the middle for the M8 thread of the bar doohickey. I wrecked a drill bit and over-heated and warped the washer I was experimenting on ... oops. So that bit is possible, at any rate. That leaves you with having to find only a 4mm jam nut ... get busy with a vise and file! Solution 1 : grind and drill your own BSSW, use bearing-washer, file down a stainless nut to 4mm and use the OEM nyloc nut.
Less demanding of elbow grease is the option I tested the other day ... I bought the only little bag of nyloc nuts I could find in hardware stores in Japan and simply bolted it onto the stack above the BBW. The nyloc nut though is not (or does not look like) stainless steel, maybe zinc coated or something. It's also taller than the OEM nyloc nut at 9mm and the lip at the top where the nylon ring is, is taller than the OEM nyloc nut - if you wanted to file this down, you'd end up with a very slim hex part. Solution 2 : keep the BBW, use the full thrust-bearing stack, add the M8 non-stainless nyloc nut ... and some thread-locking compound.
Those are the two options that most appeal to me - you could also use 2 short M8 stainless nuts or file them down a bit ... Solution 3 : BSSW, 2/3 thrust-bearing stack, 2x filed down M8 nuts.
I'm of the opinion that so long as the thrust-bearing is doing its job and spinning freely the torque on the solitary nyloc nut is minimal and easily secures the rig ... and some thread-lock for paranoia! So I'm of the opinion that for ease of install and use, Solution 2 is the best option. Only time will tell if the components hold up to the water and work-out ...
Also, I prefer a nyloc nut on the end of the stack because, as you can almost make out in the pictures below, tightening the T-tube doohickey so the end of the thread stays in the nylon ring should stop it eating up the FLS line. One other thing to note too is at the other end of the CL and QR gubbins ... with the original setup, there's a bit of slack in there - the black CL holder has free-play on the T-tube. I think this is necessary because the welds on the stopper for the spring stand proud, and if it was all tightened up snug the black CL holder couldn't spin freely. It's also handy because it'll let the holder move around and should enable grit to be washed out of the bearing stack.
Someone put a thrust bearing at the end of the black tube but that's totally necessary I reckon as when the CL is under load, it's pulling the CL holder down and the kite is pulling the T-tube up - the only stress will be ... exactly where the thrust bearing is!
Here are the pics of what I've got. Crappy cell phone cos I can't find memory cards/chargers/batteries for the cameras at home that can do a proper macro.
After all that I bet you want to know how it all works? Well, it's bloody sweet! Spins perfectly, very smooth. Easy to untwist lines - too easy in fact! My first few uses, the bar spun so easily that my reactions hadn't accounted for the smoothness and I'd grabbed the bar backwards ... PLOP drove the kite into the water!
What pretty much happens is that the depower line simply untwists itself when you spin the bar to untwist the lines. An added bonus is that the bits rotate with the bar, so the CL stays square on your harness while the bar moves around ... neato! Well worth all the hassle involved of getting the bits ...!
UPDATE : 10th of April, 2012
Should've gotten to this sooner...
When I got back from NZ (and using the 21 in the salt water) I had with me some stainless steel nyloc nuts. I got around to replacing the zinc ones finally...
Actually, that's not true at all. I bought some SS nylocs in NZ but couldn't find them. So I went to the excruciating process of ordering some here in Japan... When they arrived, they were taller again than the zinc ones (???) at about 12mm.
Eventually - after replacing all the zinc ones with the new Japan-bought SS nuts - I found the ones I bought in NZ... in a ziploc bag of camera chargers and cables :-/ Murphy, you bugger.
So again, I replaced all the Japan-SS nuts with the NZ-SS nuts - which were shorter than all the other ones :o more like the original FSer ones.
Le sigh.
So the big news was that the zinc nut corroded like crap in the salt water. It looked furry and nasty and left a rust stain on the SS washer and green gunk on the brass one. The rust and gunk all wiped off easily though and the bearing itself was still super-sweet!
Despite having only one nut, it hasn't shifted at all... and I don't expect it to - so long as the bearing spins :)
Another great forecast ... and it panned out this time!
Got to Locus about 1pm, looked at the wind and was like "Meh!" but Hironobu said it was going to pick up so I set up the 13m Crossbow & crossed my fingers.
By the time I got on the water at 2pm, it had picked up so I was riding just-powered and feeling fine ... for about 30 minutes.
The wind continued to pick up and I had to totally depower the kite - as Drewculous would say "Epic, gusting to Stupid" and I went into survival mode for several parts of the session! Actually had the lake all to myself for most of the duration cos I got on the lake early ... and ended up far enough upwind to avoid everyone else.
So naturally, with that much wind blowing and a 13m 'bow up, I tried to jump as big as I could. I think I landed maybe one decent jump, all the little ones but the rest I splashed-down and occasionally got slammed good :) hence the title.
Had the GoPro on the helmet so got it all on film but despite the chamois in the case, the Rain-X on the outside of the lens and the defog spray inside, something went wrong so a lot of it is blurry :( a pox on it all!
Once I knew I was powered-up, I tried to ride the Spleene Rip + but it just wasn't happening - I briefly got up on a plane for a few tacks but it seems there just wasn't enough wind (or talent!) for it do really ring my bell. Gave up and went back to ol' Faithful.
Had a great time, except for when a gust came through and lobbed me and another time I landed on the side of my face* after a good yoinking and spin. Legs were starting to give out so I came off the water after what the GoPro tells me is nearly 2 hours of solid riding!
Video on the way!
What I learned today ...
• I need a smaller kite. Switchblade 10 sounds like the business.
• I need a slightly bigger small board. FlyRadical XL sounds etc etc.
• The Pro-Tec helmet - if your head goes underwater, when you pop up again it dumps the water right down into your eyes which sucks. Especially when it takes longer to clear cos of sunglasses damming it up.
• Mount on the helmet for the GoPro - where I got in now, it's basically in the center of my forehead - which, when jumping, captures great shots of ... my gloves. Gonna move it up to the top of the helmet. Pity, cos it gives a great view of what I actually see although I don't remember staring at my gloves during jumps :(
• Rain-X is a total waste of time on the GoPro - probably the number 1 culprit for smeared gunk on the lens. Defog spray on the inside probably is a waste of time too. Gotta put in the pads to make sure cos what got recorded is mega-suck.
• I think I know what I'm going wrong with jumps - redirecting the kite too early and it's twisting me downwind before I can edge against it eg. I'm still in the air. Still - it's fuckin' fun!
* 5/4 update - my face still feels like the wife slapped me upside the head 0_o I might have brain-damage.
Thought I'd go down the lake, fly the Outlaw and check-out the Ozone CL mod ... natch, I left it at home but Hiro-chan was there so I went and had a look at him for a bit but the wind-chill was nasty so I went home. 8°C on the Yahoo! weather forecast ...
However ...!
Driving home the sun came out and I thought about 2 months with no riding so I sucked it up, took off the skirt and put my water gear in the car, turned around and drove back!
Got there about 3:30pm and pumped up the 16m Crossbow cos the wind had dropped since erm 3pm and by the time I'd done that, I was sweating :D grabbed the board and got in the water.
"Oh wow water's about as cold as last time I was in it" ... except for the wind-chill! Crikey!
So began the first session of 2011! Boy am I ever rusty ... tooled around for a bit, timidly tried to jump (lol) but the wind was on and off - even had to drag into shore cos it dropped off but I found a new hat so that was nice - but I got in about an hour's ride until my frozen balls screamed ENOUGH and I packed up.
Bit desperate, but good to be back in the saddle :D
What I learned today ...
• I really should invest in a wetsuit - shorts, 2x rash-gaurds and a t-shirt doesn't really cut it.
• Snow on the hills beside the lake is probably a good indicator of how cold it's going to be!
• The Ion Ballistic shoe things work good to keep my feet warm but they make it tough to get feet in straps and actually make my feet hurt like my ski-boots are too tight :(
• Warming up in the shower at the clubhouse ... the pins and needles were interesting. Couldn't warm up properly until I got in the bath either. One good thing about Japan - baths!
UPDATE Feb 26
Grandpa made a movie of Hironobu that day and I make a brief cameo :D
Hit the lake beach this afternoon to try to get the Synergy to bow-tie and film a recovery and test out the Ozone Access SB harness and finally fly the Flysurfer Outlaw 10m I've had for AGES but have yet to take out of the bag.
Partial success with the Synergy bow-tie thing - try as I might, it wouldn't bow tie or even misbehave too much, despite the iffy wind ... gusty norwester and turbulent near the trees but the Synergy was stable. Got one bow-tie, but as it propellered down, it bounced of the ground and straight back into the air :D
Set a jump and sent the kite across much faster than I intended and went soaring - thoughts of the tragedy in NZ recently flashed through my mind and as I hovered over the safety release, I started going down and relaxed - foot slide to bum landing ...
Had a nightmare with a line tangle as I packed up, dunno WTF that was about. Set up the Outlaw and had a play with that ...
What I learned today ...
• The Ozone harness is nice, feel the pull fairly equally between waist and leg straps unlike the Fusion - the leg straps only seem to be there on the Dakine to stop the harness riding up ... ha!
• One size fits all only just fits :( over ski-pants it'll be tight. Back on the diet!
• The Outlaw feels like a fixed bridle flying on the Ozone Turbo bar - not so much depower effect through the bar.
• Not as lifty as I thought it would be, but it is a small kite. Will be good for landboarding.
• Likes to collapse like a F.B. as I guess it has much less internal pressure when it's not flying.
• I'm a chronic mouth breather :( you can hear "huh-huh-huh" on the video and it's not like I can even blame having a cold ...!
A short blast with the Synergy 19 in over-powered conditions :D
I went to the lake with the intention of filming my de-bowtie technique (should I have managed to pull it off again) but the wind was just too full on. I also didn't have the right shoes on for scudding so I just played around a bit ...
Didn't get the camera angle right either :(
Old movie I thought I'd uploaded from March, 2010.
End of winter ride in the park on the ol' landboard, earlier this year, filmed with a helmet mounted GoPro.
You'll notice around 3:28 the very, very good reason for wearing kite killers! Also note that the back strap in no way affected my ability to ditch the kite when the gust hit ...
a.k.a. 37 going on 13. Usually it's years old, not degrees Celsius although the parallel is striking! Between summer and today. Ok not so interesting, shutting up ...
Forecast looked kickin' and it coincided with a holiday! Awesome :) so despite it being 13°C I headed out to the lake at 10-ish with my Crossbows and Synergy 19 in the boot.
Pumped up the new 2011 13 cos I wanted to get some GoPro of big jumps before the end of this season :D on reflection, I probably would have had more fun on the Synergy. Oh well.
Got on the water about 11 and while it was a bit of a cold shock to the body, it wasn't that bad. I started out the Rip Plus but I just wasn't feeling it in the chop (waves!) so went and got my trusty Flydoor from the beach. Much better!
The 13 'bow is a bit twitchy ... really gotta keep the speed in it and the board to get a constant pull - not as tractor-tastic as the 16, strangely enough. Took a bit to get used to but I got it after a while. So with the camera rolling I got stuck in ...
Wind was muy gusty ... was a touch over-powered in the gusts, just powered in the lulls (didn't lose much ground downwind) and generally was just about right. Had a great time trying to go as big as I could and got slammed good many times - obviously I'm trying then according to Law of Carl :D
Had a great 3 hours or so on the water but my thighs were started to give up - literally - so I headed back into shore in the next lull. My emergence from the water was greeted with guffaws from those standing watching - they're all in full length wetsuits and I'm in t-shirt (and rash guard) and shorts; but I wasn't cold until I got off the water and was just standing around trying to pack up!
What I learned today ...
• Don't spit into the wind.
• Miyachi said, point your board downwind more when you land the big jumps!
• Still got a few degrees C more to go until it's too cold :D
• The line mount on the GoPro - don't push the camera back against the base, it points too far down. And I really need a 16Gb-er. The Rain-Xing worked good though.
• I need more time on the Rip Plus but it's hard to invest that time when the Flydoor is so much easier to ride!
• Don't breathe out on the way down, underwater ... sometimes, you don't float back up so good.
• You can (and should) direct your body by turning and looking where you want to go - you can drive your body around much easier.
• When in doubt - stomp on the rear foot!
And here's the footage ...
Probably the only one worth watching so far. Artist merit - zero. Skillful tricks - zero. Big splashes - many. I like making the big splashes.
At long bloody last! OMG I'm not wasting any more time meddling with that damned Sony Vegas again, trying to straighten out horizons frame by frame!
This was one of my first sessions of actually riding around, doing stuff and having fun like a REAL kiteboarder ... instead of just trying to stay on the board or battling to go upwind.
I was feeling rather impressed with myself so yes I'm trying to be tongue-in-cheek with the title ...!
Forecast looked iffy but thought I'd try anyway. Went to the lake and pumped up the kite, waited around, talked to So, launched the kite, fought to keep it in the air, tried to ride a few times to test the board mount for the GoPro, waited around a lot ... no joy today.
What I learned today ...
• The self-land technique - the one that doesn't involve pulling the safety. I might have it sussed ...
• I really need that Speed 2 19m ...!
• Need to red Loctite the bolts on the board :(
