A Guide To Kite Repair

Hello, I'm Thomas from the Kitesurf Centre. Today, I'm just going to show you a couple of tips on how to fly a kite and how to get into these brilliant sports of kite flying. Yeah, I'm now going to show you how to repair a kite in case you damaged it.

So some of this maybe crashed-to kites and it's crossed a shell or when you're putting weight on your kite, there are some sharp stains and perhaps that has damaged your kite. All sorts of reasons, you make in your kite a little cut in your kite. So it's pretty simple if it's a small cut, it's an easy, nice easy repair.

You get repair patches like this with your kite. If not, you can look for some tape that's called spinnaker tape and it's exactly the same material that the kite's made of, with the sticky back and that's perfect. You got loads of colors so you can get the color to match your kite, so you won't shop too much.

So, I've got a pretty small cut here. It's only about a centimetre across, it's not too bad, a patch is going to be absolutely fine on something like that. So, cut the patch so it's quite a bit bigger than the cut so you get loads of sticky area of the patch to cover the hole.

So I'm going to cut a little square. Make sure you round off the corners on your patch. There's much less trans lifting up then.

If you got the pointy corners, you get a little bit of sand underneath it or a little bit of water, and that's going to lift up really easily so we round this all off. It's a really good idea if you're just being out with your kite and it's a little sandy or muddy, try and clean the area first with some fresh water so that your patch is going to stick really nicely. If it's a little bit damp, take it home and dry it out, to just get a bit of hair dryer on it to dry that area off so that's going to stick nicely.

So this is nice and dry, it's being cleaned, and I'll just stick my patch on. Put it on, try and get it nice and tight so it's flushed with the canopy, rub it down, and it's really good to give it a good rub and then that heats it up a bit, and the glue bonds really nicely to the kite then. So, that's going to be fine.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn it over, do exactly the same and then that means that the water or any dirt or anything can't get into the other side of the cut and start to lift up that patch. So, I do it both sides, the ends all off, and that should be fine. So if something unfortunate has happened and your kite looks like this, and you got a big hole in the middle, then unfortunately, that's going to take a little bit more than just a sticky patch.

So, find a kite repair place and get it professionally repaired because that's going to need to be stitched and put back to how it was again. So, don't worry about your kite being repaired like this. It looks really bad but something like this, a canopy repair, is actually not too hard for the professional repair to mend and the repair is going to be as strong as the kite was originally, most parts were placed to be, all colors match and you'll hardly notice it.

So, I hope that you get your kite repaired, your kite should be flying in no time, and that's how you repair your kite. .