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Re: Orange Bladders

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 3:08 am
by William Munney
U-Stick wrote:Dear all,

We came across this topic due too a tip of one of our customers.
We are the distributor of U-Stick for the most part of Europe and service thousands of customers each year with one of our Orange bladders or stick-on valves.
We support many kitebrands with their warranty issues and work very closely with many kiterepair stations in Europe.

Introducing a new material will always set off bells and make people ask questions and we are happy to answer to all comments both positive and negative to learn from eachother to keep developing better products.


Best regards
Dominique Kwaks
U-Stick Europe
The product was a bad idea and it is not helping your company's reputation. When we fix or replace a bladder the idea is to get the kite back in the air, not to be on the phone or email trying to get a warranty replacement.

Re: Orange Bladders

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 3:23 pm
by SO_FL_Kiter
U-Stick wrote: We very rarely hear of kites which need to have all the bladders replaced. If we do this usually happens when there have been production errors in the canopy which tend to damage the bladder. http://www.u-stick.eu
Well, I have done it on 2 kites. First one was a 2007 North Rebel on which I had performed about a half dozen repairs to the original bladders (valve delamination, a couple of times on the same valves). I went with 2 Orange strut bladders after the U-Stick valves (yes, I did use the correct ones) continued to come off of the original TPU material. Did not have further failures (delam) at the valve for those struts, but had pinholes in the bladder material itself after about 3 sessions. Got fed up, and just got the whole set replaced with new custom TPU bladders.

Second time was an LF Session that I purchased used. It had 2 struts and the LE with Orange bladder material installed. The LE and 1 strut were already leaking when I picked up the kite, so rather than spend time trying to repair, I did a full TPU bladder replacement and converted from Union inflation to multi point inflation.

Yes, I probably went into overkill mode, but I don't have the patience to make the same repair over and over (and I had even started taking the kite to the shop to have them do the repairs since I thought perhaps somehow I was not doing something right).

Chris

Re: Orange Bladders

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 5:41 pm
by tomatkins
chainik wrote:I have a very simple question for the Airtime rep: is there a commercially available glue that works on orange blodder? I currently have a kite that I would like to use tomorrow that has the octagonal dump valve leaking. I tried to remove it via hot water and that got the material around the valve to become totally toast (evidently the melting point of it is about equal to 220F). With any other blodder it would be no big deal - remove old valve, re-glue it with AquaSeal and I'd be kiting the next day. With orange blodder it seams that I am stuck - I need to get the stick-on valve from Airtime and that will take a long time and then I got to somehow fix the area around the valve which is impossible to do without good cement. How do you remove these valves anyways if hot water does destroy the blodder material? Is it basically a throw-away product - once one valve delaminates, you have to throw it away because there no way to remove it without destroying the blodder?
I would hope that you get an answer to your question... but I think that the question has gone unanswered before, on this forum.

If not, then, there is a way to repair your problem using tear-aid and a stick-on valve... but it is tricky. I saw a very clever repairman, named Joel, on South Padre Island, do the following, on a failed Aquaseal valve repair, which left a mess, after the North valve pealed off, anyways.

He cut out the messed-up area around the valve AFTER making a "jig" to allow him to perfectly reposition the new stick-on valve, in the same position that the old valve occupied. He then placed a large patch of tear-aid to cover the cut-out area. I can't remember if he put a second large patch on the INSIDE of the bladder, or if he somehow put a piece of bladder material inside the bladder opening, to keep the large patch of tear-aid from sticking to the opposite side of the bladder. Anyway, after the large patch was in place, he positioned the new stick-on valve in the exact right position on top of the large patch, using the "jig" to perfectly orient the valve. It worked, and the kite held air.

Re: Orange Bladders

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 7:45 pm
by chainik
Thanks, I sure hope Airtime will stop making a secret of what material the bloody blodder is made of or tell us what glue works on them or at the very least be willing to sell us that glue. The claim that there is no commercially available glue to attach to the blooders is nonsense - there is a glue to attach anything to anything if we know what material is being used. The problem with your suggestion is that I need a sufficiently large piece of material to rectify the problem - at least 8'' by 12'' and tear-aid comes only in 3'' width. Besides, I keep hearing that tear-aid does not permanently work on orange blooders and the only thing that works is postage tape which is even narrower. Frankly, I am very surprised at the complete disregard of all our problems in their leading product line from a company that used to have a very good reputation for customer service. I am not asking for a replacement of obviously defective product or free warranty repair - all I want is the glue so that I can fix it myself. And what I am getting back is either silly jokes or silence. That is really lame!

Re: Orange Bladders

Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:11 pm
by sharkz
I am also looking for that magic glue for the orange u-stick bladders.. Has anyone figured out anything?