In the 90’s, when WPI was working on ways to adjust the power on FB kites I came up with a few ideas how to easily shorten bridle lines in small
increments. Thus a “line gobbler”, a little gadget that does just that was born. It proved to be very useful to adjust AOA and PA. I used it on all
my kites for a number of years but the ease of use and its effectiveness depended on the bridle system of a kite. So eventually, when confronted with
the ever increasing number of kites with the mixed, horizontal and vertical bridle systems I limited the use of the gobblers in favour of the equally
or more effective “reducers” combined with occasional use of line gobblers for AOA adjustments. A reducer is a thin line of adjustable length joining
points of attachment of power lines to the bridle leads. Adjusting the length changes PA and so the power – higher AR allows wider power adjustments
and conversely - not suitable for Nasas. There is very little stress on this line so it can be very thin to make the added drag irrelevant. WPI ran
a number of tests comparing higher performance kites “reduced” to “non-reduced”(e.g 5.0 reduced to 4 vs 4.0, etc) and has not been able to detect any
loss of performance. In fact the turning ability and upwind performance was sometimes better then the non-reduced equivalent. There is a noticeable
increase in resistance to the turning input. The maximum reduction of power is determined by the shortest length of the reducer which should be
longer than the strop length or limited by folding tips. This is no substitute for a depowerable kite when there is an advantage of using one but
allows the use of a fewer kites as well as a quick change of size with changing conditions. With an addition of a 5-th line operated by the free
hand, the reducer can be used on the go but other than the tests I ran on small kites to see that the idea works, I never found a need for that.
Line gobblers got a new lease on life when I started modifying Nasas, specifically adjusting AOA and trailing edge pull for better performance.
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