by Carlo
The Turbolauncher is a tool which allows you to pre-rig your lines. The idea is that you save time the next time you go to the beach as your lines will be pre-rigged. You don't need a lot of space to connect your lines to your kite - just connect and walk your lines out - making it ideal for kiteboarders with limited beach space - or those launching from boats.
Pre-rigging your lines on the Turbolauncher involves 5 steps :
1) Lay out your lines like you normally would. Seperate all the lines clearly.
2) Gather your lines near the control bar and feed it through the slot of the Turbolauncher as illustrated below.
3) Snap the bar to the base of the Turbolauncher, and start rolling your lines around the spool.
4) When you have about 5m of line length left, wrap the remaining lines around the hooks of the base as illustrated below.
5) Snap the lines into the relevant slots as illustrated below.
6) Go to your kite, unhook the lines from the line slots and connect them.
7) Unwrap your lines. If you are on the beach walk the lines out. If you're on a boat jump in the water, and while the kite is drifting downwind unwrap the lines.
8) Put the turbo launcher away.
9) Launch by either self launching or ask a friend to launch you.
We found everything to be working fine up until the end of point 3. By the time you have wrapped most of the lines on the spool, the lines have started twisting and falling over each other, even though the lines have been laid out far from each other.
If you wrap the lines in figure of eights around the hook points of the Launcher (point 4), and you haven't lost reference yet, it is very likely that you will loose reference now. At this stage the lines will twist over each other like they do when you wrap the lines around your bar.
By the time you are ready to hook the lines into the line slots, all reference has been lost.
We tried it slightly different by hooking the lines into the line slots when we have 5m of line length left, and then wrapping the remaining lines over the launcher, and even at this stage we managed to loose reference to the lines on most of the occasions.
If you loose reference of your lines at any point you have to start over again.
Once you've pre-rigged your lines, connected them to your kite, and are ready to launch you have one final problem. You have to put the Kitelauncher away.
Having said all this, it did become a little bit easier after we tried it a few times. With practise this tool can assist with connecting your lines to your kite on a beach with limited space or on a boat.
There are too many steps involved in pre-rigging your kite, and whilst doing so it is very easy to loose reference to your lines. We did this in ideal conditions - in windy conditions with limited space it can be more difficult.
Those launching from boats or with limited beach space may found this product useful, but due to the number of steps involved and the likelyhood of losing reference to your lines before hooking it into the slots, this is not really a time saver, and therefore I don't really see it as a practical tool for everyday use. If there was some kind of tool that kept your lines apart - like the tool that comes with the Slingshot kites, this tool would have been a lot easier to use.
I see this tool as a niche product for those launching from boats or those with limited beach space. For these people this product can work effectively. For everyday users this tool can create more problems than it solves.
Thanks to Mark Godley for providing us with a test unit. For more information on the Turbolauncher, visit http://www.kitelauncher.com