KiteJan

This is a copy of the Revolution kite design from a French web site. There are a number of differences in construction - mainly in that the Freedom 2000 uses plain 6mm & 8mm pultruded spars, rather than "fancy" spiral wrapped ones as in the Revolution. The sail construction is different, with the big seam down the middle and a curved leading edge by design (the Revolution 1.5 has a straight leading edge).

I built this one out of left over bits and pieces - so I tried to make the spars by joining sections together using aluminium ferrules. Partly to reuse left over spars, but partly to try and get the folded kite in a smaller package.

Because the sail is white I have used the Freedom 2000 for night flying with the sail illuminated from behind by LED lights. It was for this reason I added the so called Magic Sticks on the back of the kite to support the lights.

Made: May 2004

Details

Good Things

• Cheaper to make that a 'real' Revolution.
• Full instructions can be found on the Internet.
• Much the same performance.
• Easier to 'tweak' the basic design then with the 'real' thing.
• Night flying with the white sail illuminated from behind looks stunning.

Bad Things

• Heavier.
• More limited wind range (mainly due to the use of cheaper carbon).
• Maybe not a precise?
• Somewhat more twitchy.
• Much more fragile that the Revolution - huge, sharp pulls at the handles do result in broken spars.

Final Thoughts

Works very well indeed - I would recommend it for anyone who wants to make a Revolution type kite, but without incuring the cost of the official spars. The only practical downside is that its more fragile than the Revolution as especially the vertical spars are under alot of strain in flight. I have no doubt that some of my problems with the Freedom 2000 are due to putting ferrules in the spars (so I can use smaller spars). I also think my Revolution flying style has evolved to be somewhat agressive (lot's of very hard pulls on the handles) - which is OK on the Revolution, but does cause the Freedom 2000 some problems.....

Pack up: 83cm x 9cm