Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Another Bright Idea, or How I learned to stop worrying and tape lights to my kite.


Night-kiting.
No date yet, but Prospect Park is open until 1am.
Right now I'm looking up the cheapest, easiest, brightest way to light up our kites, and I welcome any suggestions. So far I've found little LEDs and lithium ion batteries that we can tape together, and would cost about 50 cents each. They're really bright too.
What I'd really love to have is a kite material that could be illuminated by lights around the edges, so the entire delta would glow. That sounds expensive though.

3 comments:

Nichol Alexander said...

InToTheWind's got a 600,000 candlepower, 85 flash/second, strobe light that weighs 3.5 oz's and goes for 25 bucks. I'll split it with you. Then we buy some reflective bike tape and some black spray paint and do some modifications.

And, I don't know if it's legal or anything, but I was thinking that you can also tape a laser to the nose of the kite or the bridle of the kite so you can paint the ground.

One other thought - how hard would it be to use a line of christmas lights as the line for the kite? power source on the ground. the kite pulls the cord up. maybe even if it only went up 100 or 200 feet, it'd still be pretty cool.

Nichol Alexander said...

Oh, yeah, and one other thought: if you go night kiting, you could theoretically get a really stiff piece of string that went up 20 feet or so and then pretend that you were flying a kite; that'd be pretty crazy but also pretty cool.

JeffP said...

I support all those suggestions wholeheartedly. If you go ahead and order that strobe I'll give you my half of the cash when I see you. Also, while you're ordering, if you want to throw a 13" Aerobie, and a solar balloon in there I'll pay you back for those too. I'm good for it.