in a past half year or a little more I've been very involved in one project of designing and building one cool kite. Actually two... There were few goals involved:
- higher PA% (more opened arc, more power per m2)
- less struts to minimize weight (max. 3)
- keep it simple
- keep it clean
- keep it usefull
- as little lines as possible
- possibly good at wide area of kiting
I've made many kites with less struts in the past (2 struts C, 4 struts ultra high PA). Both prooves that the kites could be good with less struts and the wider you go with arc more problems occours. Luckily I've managed to solve preety much all of the issues of having less struts to support the canopy together with wider arc.
So the result of the goals was QUAZY design.
It is a simple BUT effective 3 struts ILE design and it's a mix of SLE and delta type of kites. It completes the goal of having one design usable in wide range of kiteboarding styles!
The kites have really good power to m2 ratio (I usually ride size smaller kite compared to other riders at same size), great depower, stable in gusts, easy relaunch in any way, nice positive feedback on the bar with medium pressure. I've actually managed to make the kite more freeride or frestyle with an easy bridle mod (takes less than 1min to switch).
Currently two sizes were built, 8 & 11m flat. Thinking of building 14m
I must say a BIG BIG THANK YOU to our NEMOZ - if he wasn't here many things won't be live today!!! Nemoz is very involved in design and preety much of very big water testing proccess in Fuerte & Italy, regarding testing I've mainly did snow/land and heavy gusts testing. Also, there were many other people involved in testing, from beginners to many companies test riders.
BTW, this design is not freeware (sorry).
More pics of different stages of testing are available here, here, here and here!
But we're thinking of possibillity to make some sort of mini serie of this kites - with Kite-stuff.org sponzored price (meaning really affordable) - depending of how much people are interested in this project.