Sunday 27 January 2013

Double Dunford!

In a previous blog post, I introduced our Dunford Flying Machine and said I was going to look for a second one. Finding that second one wasn't too difficult in the end. Key to finding one was to ask who marketed the Dunford Flying Machine in the 1970s .... And the price I paid was very reasonable (and way below the £100 that at least one web-site sells them for!).

So we now have a pair of Dunford Flying Machines, one orange, and one blue. The wind forecast for today was 15-25mph, perfect for trying to fly them side-by-side. Turned out that the wind was a bit more variable than that: up to 25mph indeed, but sometimes going down to 5mph, which, if you're flying a Dunford Flying Machine, simply means the kite will drop out of the sky ...


Still, we tried to fly them both, and here they are in the air together!


One thing we had not anticipated was that, because we've had the orange FM for several years and just got the blue one, the sail of the blue FM is much tighter. And that resulted in the blue FM clearly flying faster than the orange FM, which is a bit of a pain when you're trying to fly them in a routine .... There's nothing in the bridle that can be adjusted, so we'll just have to let time take care of this.

We're not going to write a specific routine for them, but intend to make up and call the moves as we're flying to background music. And we fully agreed with Roger: what better song to use for that than "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines"!

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