K84 - Escape #2
This is to replace Escape #1 which came to a sad end at the mouth of one of my dogs, Elsie. This was the second time we had taken Elsie to the beach, and last time, she was just perfect. She’d chase the kites, but would leave them alone when they hit the ground. This time, she didn’t leave my Escape alone, and instead put a nice hole in it. We keep her on a 30’ leash at the beach now.
This build went pretty smoothly. I reused the frame, fittings, bridle and sleeve from Escape #1, so it was kind of nice to not have to deal with doing all of that. Just sewing the sail doesn’t take me too long.
Some notes:
Nose reinforcement
I did something similar to last time with an extra layer of Dacron to cover the edges on the nose. I think I can maybe cut that a bit differently or do something ahead of time to make that a bit cleaner. It’s decent, but I’m noodling on improvements.
Tail
Last time, I built the tail into the mylar spine reinforcement, and I quite liked that. I forgot about that this time though. It still looks fine, but I liked the concept of the mylar running through the spine and all the way around the tail.
Center opening
I remember having a bit of trouble cutting out the rhombus reinforcement in the middle last time, and I did it much more easily this time. On the printed blueprint, I traced out the edges of the rhombus in pencil, extending each edge out a ways. Then, I could lay down some Dacron and use those extended lines as a guide.
