There's nothing better on a hot summer day (or even a cold winter's day) than flying a kite - preferably a big one, with lots of control, and lots of pull.
There's nothing worse, on such a day, than having to untangle a kite string, either before you fly, after you fly, or some time in the middle.
I've had a variety of kites over the years, but my favourites at the moment are big parafoil ones - I've got a 2.2m span and a 3.1m span - they are awesome toys.
Each of them has four control strings - two to steer left and right, and two to control the power, so the tangle-opportunity is frightful.
The kites arrived with their string wound on a small winder (see "before" picture) - and all the strings already tied to the kite bridles and to the control handles. This is a good way of avoiding most of the string tangles, but I prefer to wind things up in a figure-of-eight rather than a straight loop (it avoids putting extra twists in the string/wire/cable), and for the big kites, the winder was rather smaller than the control handles. A bigger winder would allow me to wind
the string up (or let it out) faster, too.
Acrylic makes good kite winders - aha! A job for the Fab Lab!
A quick session with Inkscape gave me an outline, which I carefully arranged to be as big as the control handles would allow.
So, with the usual "set pen width to 0.05mm", "save as PDF", and "print to Epilog Laser", I had my first winder.
And it worked! (see "after" picture)
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