dafiah - Thanks.
alexrider - Thanks.
John-B - Thanks for your suggestion.
Gigi - Bummer about your site.
GregK - Thanks for your comments. I totally agree. The only time I've had any kind of failure on the kites is when I ditched my bar in the waves, it got stuck on bottom, loading the kite up massively for twenty rinse cycles in the impact zone, getting sucked out until the lines went tight, pinned there till the next set wave slammed it, tumbling in on the whitewater till the lines when tight again before getting sucked back out again. Was an ugly situation and reminded me why a bar needs to float. Anyway, point being - LE and all seams held, but the forces blew a hold in the canopy material. Perhaps a heavier material would have behaved differently. Although, with the forces involved in that situation, I think the failure would have found its way to the next weakest link, perhaps the seams? From beatings I've taken in the past, conventional kites didn't holdup as well. From a performance perspective, I'm totally convinced about the value of making it as light as possible. From a durability perspective, I see bladders as the general area for failure. Haven't seen a solution to this.
turfAndsurf - OK, will try. I'll admit that often I put the camera away and just go ride when the surf is decent, but I'll try to improve.
Ecoastprock - Thanks!
ed257 - I wouldn't say a strutless design requires superior fabrics. Its so balanced, perhaps it has lesser requirements. I just launched the Boardridingmaui.com website and put in the first blog post about what I saw along the trailing edge of conventional kites. This was in a light wind situation, but I think a similar illustration is the flutter common at the trailing edge of conventional kites between the wingtip and first strut. A strutless design isn't locked up in that way, and doesn't have any point loading of forces. And, no, it does not need higher LE pressure. Prior to development, I didn't know what I'd find, so probably had the same question. I guess the worry could be that the canopy is unstable and puts some weird forces on the LE. But, this has been found not to be the case. The canopy is totally stable, and its light weight probably requires less rigidity from the LE (assuming the arch and bridle are properly designed). Having said all this, I can't really say how it would work with lessor materials as I never tried. I went with the industry-leading factory, using proven materials they developed in-house specifically for the kiteboarding industry.
Thanks for all the questions and comments. BEST WISHES TO ALL FOR THE KICK OFF OF A NEW YEAR NEXT WEEK.
For anyone interested in getting on the waiting list for the first availability of boards in January and kites in February, please go to
www.boardridingmaui.com and submit your request on the homepage.
Thank you to kiteforum.com for providing a place where I could share updates while the gear was in pre-production development.