Norwegian Hanggliding

I went out and got some building materials to mount the scooter on a small trailer, while Steinar produced the drum that will hold the towing line. So far so good, now we just need to test it, hope the weather will allow it tomorrow.

Here’s the scooter mounted on a trailer. I made the supports and mounts from some 2 by 4, steel angles, and bolts. Feels quite solid and it should hold the scooter in place for towing and transport, at least until we can test if it works out ok. If not we can just put the wheels back on and sell it as a normal scooter.

Steinar will bring the rear wheel/drum tomorrow, and the rollers for the line.

Almost ready to go.

Our scootertowing project have been a great success so far, and we are committed to continue training students with the big Condor and the 50cc scooter. The low power in the scooter makes it perfect for training, and low altitude flights while keeping it as safe as possible.

The low power is also the limiting factor for high altitude flights, and more general towing needs. Tandem towing is also high on our list, as we can get some income to pay for running the rig. So last week I bought a new 125cc scooter, to be converted into a towing scooter.

Here is a picture of our new ride to heaven. It’s a cheap Chinese made bike, but for our purpose it should be perfect. It has twice the power of the old one, and a faster gearbox. It will be interesting to see how it pulls.

Since the scooter is new we needed to run it in first, and putting licence plates on it would cost the same as the price of the scooter, so we had to find a closed area to do some laps. (The garage at my job soon became too boring, but we did 3 km there :-) )

Steinar and I did 50 km on a very cold evening at a local racetrack, and Steinar did 100km more the next day (With some more clothes this time) It was mind-numbingly boring to do the 2 km laps, but thinking about the cools flights we can get with the new scooter made it worthwile…

I’m in the process of updating the look and functions of this website (Yeah, it’s raining). Please be patient while I get everything working again, should not take too long.

Update;

Should be mostly in place now, with the major stuff in place. I’m still working on the photo galleries, as well as some smaller details on this theme.

I’ve been using the same old theme for many years now, I’ve been looking for a new look for some time, but I’ve never had the chance to implement it. The Options theme that I use now was quite easy to implement, and it had some of the things I wanted for my new look. I assume most of my readers now are on LCD screens, and the dark theme should look much better than on old CRT screens.

This theme also have more room for bigger images and videos, as you can see.

What also might be useful for my readers is the new RSS feed in the right sidebar, where I aggregate news from most of the active hanggliding related blogs. Those of you who already read news from RSS probably have most of these blogs in our reader anyway.

Todo:

• Reorganize and import old photo galleries
• Reorganize old articles, add new stuff
• Add video index
• Add some different content types

Please let me know if you find something that does not work!

It’s been quite unstable weather the last weeks here in Oslo, and not much flying. Today we went out with the Scooter to Ekeberg, and did a few tows with the remaining students in between the showers.

I spent the easter in Bassano, I did not write much here on the blog as the internet connection there was shit. I did however make a short video from one flight Ove and I did in the afternoon in Bassano. It was almost dead air, and we just glided down. The landing was quite interesting though - as you can see in this video.

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Ove had landed just 10 seconds before me, flying the same path, and I’m pretty sure it was the wingtip vortex turbulence from his glider that made my right wing drop so suddenly. There was almost no wind, no turbulence, and I had plenty of speed. Without enough airspeed it would have been a rough landing after dragging the wing. That sideways slip upwards was a quite interesting expirience…

You do need the latest Flash plugin to view this video, get it here. This is encoded with x264, mp3, from my Canon camera, about 13 MB in total, and 640×480, progressive scan. Looks very good, and size is not horrible. Tell me what you think, and if it’s to slow to play.

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