Well the team here at Kitefix recently got back from a week long trip to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.  Expectations were high for the wind and weather and OBX delivered.  We had seven of seven fantastic days on the water which was the perfect way to thaw out our riding muscles and brains frozen from a season of snow kiting.

As with any kiting trip, great riding went hand in hand with some equipment breakdowns, three of which I will discuss below.

1.  Valve issue.  We have been working here at Kitefix on a new glue, engineered to work for bladders and valves.  I had the chance to test this out when my 2007 6m kite leading edge valve kept losing air.  When I took a closer look at the inflate valve, I realized that the only thing holding this to the bladder was the pressure from the bladder against the leading edge (sorry, no pictures).  We put the manufactures valve back on my kite with our Peel2Fix system and then sealed the edges of the valve with the new Peel2Fix glue.  I have to tell you, that valve is never coming off again!  Our new Peel2Fix Valve Repair kit will be the most cost efficient and bomb proof system out there for valve repairs.

2.  One of the guys we were riding with brought us his fairly new RRD kite.  The tear was a fairly straight forward rip along one of the struts that extended from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the kite, as well as along the leading edge for 6 or 7 inches (see images).

We repaired the kite using the Kitefix Ripstop Refill Kit but the cool thing is how well the red Fiberfix blended in with the pink kite.  Here are a couple of pictures of the repair.  You can hardly see where it is!

3.  The final repair we did was a bit atypical…we repaired a panel on one of our friends windsurfing sails.  The monofilm and Kevlar strips were both torn on this sail.  We had to remove some of the stitching to get access to the torn Kevlar panel (look just above the bottom baton).

We ended up putting Fiberfix on both sides of the monofilm due to the stresses experienced on windsurfing sails.

We added our Kitefix Self-Adhesive Dacron over the fixed Kevlar and Dacron, where we had previously removed the stitching, and sealed it with Glufix.  Final repair looks great and held up to rider abuse the next day.  Everything we used to do this repair can be found in our Kitefix Complete Repair Kit.

All in all a great trip!

Mark Rivers

Sales and Marketing Manager