Over the holidays I had a great time restoring a 1938 Singer Featherweight sewing machine. While this was a gift for my wife I thought it was only prudent to sew a little test project to make sure it was working well. Of late there has been a bit of buzz on the KAP Discussion page about the Fled, a design by Michael Anderson that was documented on Brooks Leffler’s’ www site So, I set about making one.

The restored Singer Featherweight 221, a very satisfying machine.

Sewing the Fled as a fun project. KiteBuilder Studio had a nice deal on red North Sails ripstop so I stayed with my standard solid red schema. I sewed a couple of small test projects – kite bags and such – until I was sewing a bit better than a drunken sailor. Then it was on to the Fled.

The Fled’s maiden flight

The Fled is a blend of traditional Flare and Sled kite geometries. I built my version fairly large and framed it with SkyShark carbon tubes. This would place it in the KAP kite lineup on the lighter wind side of the Sutton Flowform 30 and perhaps a bit on the heavier wind side of the Carlisle Kiteworks Rokakku. In test flying the kite with a drogue I found it to be a stable and polite flyer when the winds were under 12 mph or so. As winds increased beyond that it wants to yaw in ways that would be problematic for KAP.

Another first flight image.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under kite aerial photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.