Box Kite: A Single Brace Prototype

Box Kite: A Single Brace Prototype

Here is a box kite I just made. There are tons of kite plans online, but my kite has some major differences.  My box kite just has a single central brace instead of two end braces. I also used balsa instead of spruce or pine.

These changes from the norm created issues, which I dealt with, to create a really small and light weight flyer.

Traditional, flat diamond-shaped kites are harder to manage in the wind. As the wind speed rises, they'll need a longer and longer tail. Tails stabilize kites by adding drag (it's not really the weight that helps).

I wanted to design a kite that was easy to keep up and that could handle rougher winds without the need for longer and longer tails-all in as small a kite as possible.

This led me to a box kite, because multi-planed kites are easier to fly and usually don't require any tail.

I also wanted to go extremely light and small. I replaced the usual spruce and pine with balsa wood.

Weight per cubic foot

Spruce = 28lbs

Pine = 26-45lbs

Carbon Fiber = 106lbs

Aluminum = 168lbs

Balsa = 4-24lbs

As you can see, balsa is much lighter than the other materials. You'll notice that carbon fiber is really, really heavy! The secret to using light weight materials is actually a misnomer: they're really strong for their used size. 

Steel is heavier than aluminum but an aircraft part made of aluminum the size of a pencil can be redesigned and made out of steel the size of a toothpick. Making an aluminum part as an exact copy in carbon fiber doesn't save you much weight, but you can make it thinner and in a different (smaller, thinner, shorter) shape and that's where the real weight savings begin to appear.

My redesign? Well, I didn't just replace the spruce with balsa. I also radically modified the traditional box kite design by getting rid of the end braces and creating a single, central brace.

Wind passing over a plane wing creates lift. An airplane propeller creates wind over the wing. The Wright Brothers took box kites in a cellular / modular design and added an engine to create wind on demand. Boom: a hard to steer airplane!

Then the Wright Brothers came up with something awesome: make the boxes super-flexible! This really helps catch and keep the wind.

Instead of a rock solid brace at both ends of the box, my design has a slightly flexible central brace! It will catch the wind more easily. Also, I'm now using lighter wood-and a lot less of it. [edit: I oddly used heavy newspaper instead of lighter materials like plastic grocery bags to cover this].

Another change I made is to scale down the traditional box kite measurements. Box kites were used to lift things like emergency radio antennas in life rafts. Almost and other box kite plan you'll see online the standard 40" long rail variety or larger. This box kite is only 10" long!

A (Braces)               17"     8.5"     4.25"    2.125"    1.7"

B (Rails)                  40"      20"        10"            5"       4"

C (Skins)                 12"        6"          3"            1.5"    .75"

D (String offset)    6"          3"         1.5"          .75"    .375"

E (End String)       60"        30"         15"         7.5"    3.75"

F (Offset String)    50"        25"         12.5"     6.25"    3.375"

Basically, I just scaled down everything. I came up with the above numbers and used the third column-except for the string lengths (E and F) leading to the bridle.

Balsa cuts and saws very easily.

I notched the center brace components using the little Xacto saw and then just cleaned up the notch with an Xacto blade.

My new, experimental one-of-a-kind Logusz Brace. It joins together tightly even without glue.

The other joints were notched as well.

Clamps! I highly recommend you don't do what I did by using heavy clamps. Also, don't use alligator clips because they'll damage the balsa. Go online and order some "panel clamps" for $2 each. They're perfect for this type of thing and are made for clamping thin bits of metal together for welding. Mine are arriving in a few days.

To true up the frame I used the paper skin to pull things into shape. I wrapped the end around a rail with glue and let it dry. This let me pull really hard on the paper and thus keep things taut and straight.

Here's the first joint that anchors the skin. I let it dry before continuing with construction so I could pull the paper tight.

Notice the center brace isn't (yet) straight like a + sign. It will be!

Strings for the bridle. A string passes through a ring and connects two rail ends. The other string also passes through the ring and connects to two points in the halfway point of the opposite ends' paper skin.

The metal wire shown is pulling on the clamp, which makes the central brace straighten out into a perfect "+" sign shape.

Nice and straight!

A bread tie used as a glue brush. I ran it between each rail and the paper skins.

I put 4 layers of transparent tape on the skins where I drilled holes for the strings using apin vice drill.

Curved tweezers / forceps are indispensable for knot tying.

Both strings get looped around a plastic ring twice. This forms a bridle which self adjusts, allowing the kite to stay with the wind-eliminating the need for a tail.

There she is: a single brace box kite! Single, central brace. Quarter size balsa. Ultra light. Tail-less.

I ain't got no tail either... but then again, I can't fly. Meow.

Great Balls of Carbon!

Great Balls of Carbon!

 ...ok, they're actually teeny-tiny charcoal spheres.

These are little black balls I found inside of an old hard drive I just took apart. They are charcoal. Activated charcoal pellets to be exact. Like tiny versions of the charcoal briquettes you might use in your barbeque grill, which were invented by Henry Ford.

You burn something with carbon in it (most things in the universe) while providing lots of oxygen. The result is very porous charcoal. The pores are shallow like the dimples on a golf ball. They increase the surface area and help soak up poisons and other contaminants like gases in the air.

In hard drives they're in a little cup with a vent on one side and gauze on the other. This acts as an air filter for the hard drive. I had the same setup for my aquarium when I raised pufferfish! A gauze pouch with charcoal pellets for cleaning the water.

SiliCON vs SiliCONE  vs Carbon

The carbon pellets are also super bouncy. Like, oddly bouncy. Way more than the polymer ball we made a few posts back. That surprised my, but a quick glance at the Periodic Table shows that carbon lives right above silicon, which you'll remember from the non-Newtonian fluid and polymer post and the fast that it's what makes Silly Putty so bouncy...well, that's silicone with an "e" at the end polymer made from silicon. Carbon forms much more stable bonds than silicon, but it likes other carbons to bind to. Silicon likes oxygen, and although it's less stable than carbon bonds silicon plenty of molecules-great molecular subunits linked together (very bouncy). Silicone rubber (which is a silicon polymer) has a Young's Modulus of 0.001 and carbon is less elastic at 4.1.

Balls bounce one way, balls bounce the other way. Meow. 

Here is one on the xyz stage of my microscope. The white disk is actually the other side of the black cup/filter assembly it was in with a zillion of its pals. A little ways below I have a better photo of this cup.

Here's some various videos made with 3 different cameras, a very nice microscope and some really terrible out-of-sync lighting. This gives a good sense of their miniscule size.

The very same from my previous video:  little black balls I found inside of a hard drive I just took apart.

They are charcoal. Activated charcoal pellets to be exact. Like tiny versions of the charcoal briquettes you might use in your barbecue grill, which were invented by Henry Ford.

They're in a little cup with a vent on one side and gauze on the other. This acts as an air filter for the hard drive. I had the same setup for my aquarium when I used to  raise Figure-Eight pufferfish!

In this video I put them under a very nice microscope...but with a very cheap ($1.99 used) webcam and terrible side lighting. My microscope has very, very, very good lighting for looking at slides and other things properly prepared for microscopy with the light coming from *underneath* the slide-not from the side.

Also a point of annoyance: I was testing a crappy webcam (an ancient GE model) that I bought used for $1.99. The flicker is from the LED flashlight not syncing with the webcam.

So, a lot of ugliness on this one. Check my other videos for better cameras (a big Canon in HD, but also my cheap Samsung cellphone and Nexus tablet have way, way, way better video than this GE webcam).

This video was: cheap camera, cheap flashlight just as a quick peak. On the blog post I'll put some better looking still photos.

For a $1.99 I finally have a webcam. At some point I might bash the lens off of it and point its CCD array straight into a dark container with a photo-amplifier tube / scintillator in it to create an alpha particle radiation detector. Sort of like the alpha spark detector I made a video of, only digital.

The microscope is actually very nice (stereo eyepiece, xyz stage, abby condensor, LED with electronic dimming switch and various mechanical shutters for dimming and changing the incidence angle of the light, 2000x oil immersion lens: basically all the bells and whistles and the highest reflected normal light magnification physics allows! All coupled (today only) on a webcam that costs less than a can of Red Bull, lol.

I was also holding the webcam with one hand while moving the xyz stage and focusing with the other--I'm being terribly unprofessional today. I actually have a side illuminator for microscopes that I could have used also. It has a nice (non-harsh, non-flickering light) but this was only a test and with the lousy webcam it would't have made much of a difference.

I kept changing video cameras, but kept the lousy lighting.

Speaking of old technology, I also found this cool brochure for coin operated computers for our library. Pineapple Computers!

Neat, but my computer glows in the dark!

I don't care about the black balls, but I need you to make sure none of these old hard drives have any snakes in them! Mee-yow!

Aluminum Screams: A Saltwater Synthesizer

Aluminum Screams: A Saltwater Synthesizer

If you touch copper wires to a drop of saltwater on aluminum you can hear decaying and regenerating synthesizer-like sounds! I stole this idea from Nyle Steiner, who I gained tons of information about thermocouples from for the last post. Mr. Steiner is the inventor of a variety of Electronic Wind Instruments and has played on a ton of TV and movie soundtracks-good movies too, like Apocalypse Now!

So, what do you do to make the aluminum scream like the metal coins did in dry ice a few posts back? I did this:

Run two copper wires to a speaker or guitar amplifier.

Join the wires together with a resistor of at least 100k value.

Touch one wire to the aluminum.

Touch either the insulation of the second wire to the aluminum with a little saltwater on it OR carefully touch the copper part of the second wire to a droplet of saltwater on the aluminum WITHOUT touching the aluminum.

You can just attach the wires to the end of a guitar cord, the other end of the cord is of course plugged into a guitar amplifier.

Soda cans are made of aluminum.

Both wires are bridged together with a resistor. Use one that's 100k or more. I tried a few different values and heard no difference, but I didn't try many put out and I had them parallel, not in series.

It seems that I got more complex sounds when touching the wire, or just the rubber insulation to corroded or damaged parts of the aluminum.

Here's a taste of the weirdness in video/audio:

...do you still hear the aluminum screaming Clarice? 

So, what's going on? Well, if you hook up a multimeter you'll find aluminum plus saltwater produces voltage. The voltage is variable. So this may be like a keyboard synthesizer Voltage Control Oscillator (VCO). Saltwater on aluminum foil can be used to create an ultra simple electrolytic battery that can power an LED. Changing voltages makes noises, whether it's steel guitar strings affecting the magnetic field of the guitar's pickup, a microphone diaphragm moving because of human voice sound waves or this crazy setup.

To juice up the electrolytic aluminum and Saltwater battery you can add lye. What would that do to the sound output of our saltwater synthesizer?

Would solid core copper wire sound different? How about different concentrations of saltwater? Burned aluminum? Aluminum that's being heated or even red hot? How about lemon juice instead of saltwater?

This is a great thing to have on the shelf for future experimentation when nothing else is going on. It's simple and easy to change variables in this little circuit.

By playing around you can obtain incredibly complex noises that evolve and sound like Electronic Music. It's really, really weird.

"Build stuff-you'll have fun!" -Michael Logusz

Abstract music, abstract kitty! Meow.