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KITE HISTORY: Grand-Son of Woodstock: |
The story begins with
“Woodstock ‘94”, 25 years after the original Woodstock Concert. Kite Studio,
owned by Tony Ferrel and his son Steve, was commissioned to construct some innovative
fabric cell structures that were displayed every night on either side of the
two main stages at the Woodstock ‘94 Concert. Each of the four structures were
triangular in shape, 60 feet wide, 40 feet high, 2 feet deep, with 111 cells
per structure for a total of almost 5000 yards of nylon. On August 15, 1994 the
Philadelphia Inquire published a picture on their front page of Aerosmith
playing to a throng of 35,000 fans in front of Kite Studio’s cell structures at
Saugerties, NY.
I was convinced that these structures were
aerodynamic and I convinced about a dozen of the local kite makers that helped
the Kite Studio finish the Woodstock project on time (no easy task - you should
have seen the mountains of ripstop everywhere) that we should build a 40% model
of the structure, 24 feet wide and 16 feet high, of the structure, add 150
linear graphite sticks; and, fly it at the ‘94 American Kitefliers Association
(AKA) Convention in Wildwood, New Jersey. The kite was appropriately named the
“Son of Woodstock”. The flight
was awesome, required 1000# test fly line, and an anchor buried 3 feet in the
sand, to hold the kite during the power phase of the launch.
Two years later, in 1996, I created a box
inside of a box inside of a box, with the internal boxes rotating and
counter-rotating called the “Monica
Turbine” which won 1st place in Innovative Concepts, at the ‘96 AKA
Convention in Santa Monica, California.
Well, as the story goes, the “Son of
Woodstock” was stored in the same closet as the “Monica Turbine,” and in the
intimacy of the evenings together, the “Grand-son of Woodstock” was born...
The “Grand-son of Woodstock,” created in September of 1997, features a 8 foot wide slimmed down version
of the “Son” on the front, the “Monica” rotators for the middle, a deep dihedral
large rudder tail for stability, and tail wings to balance the center of
pressure. The combination proved to be effective with a very high flight angle
and a wind range from 8 MPH to 30 MPH. The kite won 2nd place cellular at the
1997 AKA Convention in Wildwood, New Jersey, with a cracked tail spar caused by
over 30 MPH winds at competition time, and then followed with a 1st place
cellular win at the 1998 Smithsonian in Washington DC, after that rogue stick
was replaced with a fatter one.
In 1999, I was honored to
be one of 17 world wide master builders asked by Terry Zee Lee to create a Kite
for the “Sky, Wind, World Millennium
Kite Exhibit” to be displayed throughout the year 2000 at the Billings,
Montana, International Airport, and then in March of 2001 to be auctioned off
in a world wide internet auction with the proceeds going to the Yellowstone
Museum. I couldn’t help but choose what I considered to be my finest design to
date, the “Grand-son of Woodstock”; however I wanted to create an “event
personal kite”. So, since Woodstock was a millennium event, I decided to keep
the original white Woodstock front cell historically accurate; with the rest of
the colors up for grabs. From the Montana State Flag, I chose the yellow-orange
hot sunset color for the event logo wing appliqué and the center checkerboard
rotator depicting the sun rising and setting simultaneously; the bright blue
for the mighty “Mo” was used in the center rotator depicting moving water, and
in the tail for the blue in “big sky country”; the purple in the tail is for
purple mountain majesty, along with blue water surging over the purple mountain
falls in the rotator. The tail rudder combines all the colors into a sunset
over mountains and water. Finally, I added some innovative engineering on the
spine parts to improve the already great design, and called this new kite: the
“Grand-son of
Woodstock II @ Billings.”
The improvements made to
the original kite during construction of
Grand-son II were incorporated into the original and are included in the
design contained herein.
