Q: If you could, please tell me about who you are and what you do.

Name : Peter Peters
Age : 40
Married : yes
Kids : 2
Job : Systems expert. (I do system administration and program design/development for the computer science department of our university.)

Q: What made you interested in kites?/ Why do you fly kites?

A television program which had an item about a kite festival. Immediately after that I wanted to start building kites. I bought a book, picked a plan (A "vector". Waaaay too difficult/big for a first time...) and started building... I fly kites because I love the idea to be able to control the movement of such a flying object in a gracefull way. Especially if it's an object I created myself...

Q: Do you build any kites yourself?

Up to now, I built everything I own (kites that is...) Apart from the above mentioned vector, which I see as one of the two failures up to now I built a spin off, a couple of revolutions, a gizmo, two raaseri's, a mini, a tram-session (jam-session look-alike), a Wacko (Stranger look-alike), a sanjo, and some smaller stuff. Currently I'm building an indoor kite. Pictures of most of these are on my kite site.

Q: What kind of building materials do you use?

At first I used nylon rip-stop cloth and fibreglass/wooden rods, but soon I discovered rip-stop polyester (Icarex) and carbon rods... I use mostly that now. Depends on what the kite needs...

Q: What kind of experience did you gain in building kites? (tips and stuff)

Whoa... that's too much to mention AND I'm still learning. Currently I'm trying to get some appliqué done, which is quite difficult if you want to do it nicely... Most things I learned are about the way materials should be handled (hot cutting, cold cutting, sewing, cutting rods, gluing,....) and the order in which things should be done.

Q: Any good kite stories?

Well, the above mentioned vector was my maiden project (kite) and also flying that kite was my maiden flight. Wind was good that day, as I was told there had to be a fair breeze, so I waited for the right time. I setup the kite and pulled the strings. It immediately took off with a lot of noise and pull... It really scared the wits out of me. (Not the noise...the pull !). I really had to struggle to keep on my feet, and I was trembling all over when I finally succeeded to get the kite down in one piece.

One more.

I was quite a fanatic a few years ago and started getting into "trick" flying. I took out a small 3/4 sized kite one cold day in December (temp. was about -8 degrees (Celsius), wind was blowing like crazy, but as I said, I was a kite fanatic so I had to fly...) Thing went ok, until my fingers went a little numb. I did a (non intended) nose landing (crashed straight into the frozen ground going down). The center spine of the kite went through the kite's nose. The kite was stuck. I was too busy laughing about the awkward position of the kite to be worried about the damage. I had to apply some real force to get it out of the ground again. The spine went into the ground for about 5 cm.... I tried to stick my pocket knife into the ground just as deep but failed to do so.

Looking at both stories it seems that they also should warn newbie flyers about the forces they control....