Philip Le Riche's Kites Home Page

Introduction

This site is my page of odd bits and pieces. If you want to see something more substantial, visit my Virtual Kite Zoo, and discover scores of different kinds of kites, with sketches, plans, pictures, and all sorts of interesting snippets of information.

Or, for a breath of (virtual) fresh air, try my Virtual Kite Festival.

And if you're waxing poetical, here's my Kite Poetry Anthology.

Also in a literary vein, I have a translation of a little of Les Cerfs-Volants (The Kites) by Romain Gary. A lovely story about an old French kitemaker, knicknamed "the potty postman".

Here, though, you will also find the Virtual Kite Zoo Plans and Pics collections, and the Curator's page - find out a bit about me and my family, and how I got interested in kites. The plans and pics are ones I have collected myself - the Zoo contains hotlinks to many more scattered across the net.

Rowlands Flowform (and other kites)

Many people, wishing to build a soft kite, have used the plans in Soft Kites and Windsocks by Jim Rowlands. There has been much discussion of these plans on rec.kites, especially the Flowform. Here is a compilation of these postings, collected from a period of several years.

A little while ago I did some research on the variability of results obtained by different people with the Flowform plans. I sent out a questionnaire to rec.kites and email, followed by a couple of extra questions to all those who answered. Here is a synthesis of the original questionaire with the additional questions added. Here are my conclusions, the results as an Excel spreadsheet, and as raw text (with fields separated by tabs, for easy import to your favourite spreadsheet). In case you don't have Excel or a spreadsheet that will import Excel, here and here are the plots of the results.