New Trick?

Friday, with the wind blowing about 18, I decided to mess around with my Alien for a bit. Because of the stronger winds, and my not compensating for it at first, I did a couple of axels without enough slack in the line. The alien has a real crappy center T that sticks out like the nipple of some 15 foot 1700 LB woman wearing a silk blouse in the dead of winter on the eastern Canadian border. it's a good 3/4 of an inch wide, and sticks up probably about an inch. When the line caught on it, the kite would stop in a pancake position, dead in the sky, and at first this was annoying as I worked through how much slack I needed to give it to complete something so simple as an axel. With time however, once I got it to where it didn't stick there, I started trying to see how consistently I COULD get it to stick there. I was easily able to perform the half axel, stop, back to flying position, but that wasn't enough, that became constantly recreatable, so I played some more and can now, most of the time (2/3's?) get the kite to half axel, stop, and full 540 flat spin in the other direction. I'm considering super gluing a 'nub' onto my BadBoy (the kite I'm probably going to be competing with this year) and working it into a routine, very VERY cool looking!. So then, until someone say's they've already named this trick, I'm referring to it as a 'Half Back' : ) Now if I can just learn the trick to 'continuous axles' I'll be in the gold! (If I win the lottery between now and comp season, I'm flying Andy Wardly, the god of the continuous axel, to Corpus for some personal lessons, you name the price man!)

I guess the real question is this, can it be considered a trick if it requires a messed up Center T to perform?

I like my Alien too Jamey, but 1700 lbs?? You'll piss her off!!

Mikey luvs ya!!

Slot Machine, innit? Or am I missing something?

James 'A bicycle is transport, while a car is patently not a bicycle.' [JT (uk.r.c - 26/08/2000)]

Axel as normal, say, clockwise, then stop the kite half way through the axel, in the pancake position (by catching a line on the center T) and do a bull 540 counter-clockwise. Looks like a top being prepared and then spun, half spin in one direction, then zooooom in the other, very sweet

Jamey

Actually I think James put his finger on it. It is a Slot Machine in the observed motion of the kite. The only way I can actually do a slot machine is slow, and horizontally. It looks exactly like you are describing. The one advantage the Alien center T is giving you, is that the kite can rotate a little farther before you pop it back the other way.

WT

Jamey

You can do horizontal slots, vertical slots or diagonal slots. The hand motions are pretty much the same in all cases except that the two pops are closer together and harder the nearer to the vertical you're doing the trick - at least for me they are.

The slot machine is quite simply a flattening out of the kite in one direction followed by a 540 (or more) flatspin back in the oposite direction.

IMO, they look far nicer and more defined on lower aspect ratio kites such as the Illusion than on higher aspect ratio kites such as the Elixir. I'm using Prism kites purely 'cos I know 2 of 'em with quite different ARs - I can't think of any other makes off the top of my head.

The trick to the trick is quite simple: just go BANG - BANG

Ahem

James 'A bicycle is transport, while a car is patently not a bicycle.' [JT (uk.r.c - 26/08/2000)]

ok, I may have some of my terminology mixed up, threre a guy down on south padre island who thinks he knows what he's doin, and he showed me the slot machine as being a verticle axel, using 2 tugs on one line, instead of the kite being paralell with the ground, it's perpendicular. If a slot machine is a half axel to the left (in this description) /540 to the right , then what's this verticle axel i been doin called? Thought that was a slot machine, heh...

I haven't spent enough time around real fliers to pick up on the names of a lot of these things... I'm so damn confused...

jamey