When to pull your Rev by Revolution Kites

Transcript

1. ›

   Why people pull

   0:00

   Today we're going to talk about pulling. There's a big question about why people pull with their hands, what it does, and why they do it. When I start teaching, the first thing I like to avoid is pulling, because we have a lot of experienced two-line fliers, and all they do is pull. They understand pulling, and it means a certain thing to them. With the Revolution, pulling means something completely different, so I like to change that idea. I like to lock down the hands and keep them together until I have a reason to separate them. Keep those two ideas apart: the two-line kite is over here and your Revolution is over here, two completely separate ideas. With that understood, let's talk about pulling.

2. ›

   Pulling slides the Rev

   0:43

   The wrong way to pull is to pull for a left turn or pull for a right turn. It doesn't turn the Revolution. What it actually does is slide your Revolution sideways. The place it's most commonly used is in a side hover or side-flying motion. You can see my hands are offset from each other. That is sliding the Rev up and down depending on the wind. When I have less wind, I need to pull the top wing toward me to generate enough lift. As the wind gets higher, I don't need that much lift, and I can bring the handles closer together. That's really the point. If you fly to the left or fly to the right, you want to pull the top wing toward you. That's the most common one, and this is what it looks like going over to the right. My hands are offset and I maintain that position. If I pull back a little more, it goes up. If I pull back a little less, it drops down. As it's flying across, I maintain that position, then I do a turn and float back the other way, and my hands are offset again. So that's pulling reason number one.

3. ›

   Accelerating the wing

   1:59

   The second very common reason for pulling is that you're trying to accelerate the wing. You can pull with both handles and accelerate both wings. It's a kind of hop motion, because you're adding a shot of speed, as if you were adding your own wind to it. You can also do that on a single wing: you accelerate just one wing, and you'll often see that in what's called a snap turn or fast spin.

4. ›

   Single-wing acceleration and snaps

   2:33

   This is a more complicated idea, because you have two wings and you can accelerate each wing in either direction. You can have both wings forward, or both wings back, which puts the Rev in reverse, and then pull. Or you can accelerate just one wing, say the bottom wing, which is the right wing: accelerate it forward and it pops up off the pole, or accelerate the left wing. That's how a snap happens. The other thing you can do is accelerate a wing in reverse. Let's say the bottom wing is in reverse: you reverse that handle and then pull at the same time. That's really where those pulls come from.

5. ›

   Other reasons people pull

   3:18

   If you see people pulling for other reasons, with their hands going up, they're probably doing one of those things, or they think their Rev is falling out of the air and they pull it up. The last case is when the Rev is flying backwards or in a hover and there's not enough wind, so people start to pull. All they really have to do is rotate the handles into the four positions, thumbs back, and your Rev goes. That's where a lot of the confusion comes from: people start pulling and yanking because they're trying to get their Rev to fly, and it's really in the handle rotation. So the key is the handle rotation. Give this a try and let me know what you think.