Home-made harnessback-strap

A South African kiting wizard (the cool bloke with the cowboy hat who was at the Skem kite festival some weeks back) told me how to make a cheap DIY kite strap as an alternative to a harness. It goes around your waist and attaches to those two loops on your handles (where you peg them into the ground). I made one recently from two shoulder straps from computer cases. You know the ones? ...black webbing...with two hooks or clips on the end?

Anyway, it works fine and its a bit of fun now and then ...but I dont use it in serious winds ..just in case

By the way, the advice I received for ejecting from the home-made 'back-strap' - is to duck forward and push your hands and arms out in front of you - and (in theory) the strap rides up your backbone and over your head, without taking your ears off!!

I've used backstrap with my Ramjet in winds strong enough for scudding. It works fine and for releasing, because the typical 'backstrap' fall is with your head and shoulders towards the kite, it should be actually pretty easy to 'bail out'.

An easier alternative to ditching the works is to tie a second, shorter, line from the backstrap attachment points to the brake line attachment points on the handle. When you are in trouble simply let go of the handles and the brakes are tensioned for instant de power.

Mike

Hi there,

well that would work with alot of kites, but especially the newer breed of kites thrives on brakeline pulling! I would certainly not recommend this with a C-Quad and some other high-perfomance foils. Check it out if this is a workable method by flying your kite around, then pulling the brake lines hard. If the kite goes down slowly, oookay that's good. However if it starts spinning wildly out of control (like my Undertaker 3m2 homebuilt would do), then do not try this method!

Just my 2 cents,