funny how many people remember about the sul elixir? Kite world is a small one.
It was made with the lighter mylar, 3/4 mil or whatever they use, I can't remember. Ozone nose webbing, lighter leading edge material, Vapor sticks, standoffs and fittings.
I put on a bridle sort of like a GEM UL. It was pretty sweet. It backspun quite nicely.
It was white, gray and florescent yellow.
I never weighed it but it had to be a lot lighter than the stock one.
The thing is.... it still flew like an Elixir, which means didn't really fly very well. If you're a hard core elixir fanatic and you're really really really into light wind flying, you'd probably have fun with it. Otherwise you'd probably be better off with a modern kite that actually flies worth a damn. I really liked the kite back then, but I'm not sure if I would now. It's a little too hard to fly. (by fly, I mean go up in the air under some control and then fall out of the sky if you looked at it wrong)
What I learned about Elixir mods is that if you do anything that makes the kite less durable, it takes away a lot of the fun. The Elixir is/was cool because you could pretty much thrash it to death and it kept on going. I find that the bone stock kite is the most fun. Mark got it right, no need to mod it out.
I was thinking of trying to talk Mark into making a new version of the Elixir, but then I got to thinking, who would want to fly an Elixir now days? If it flew anything like the old Elixir, people would hate it. If it flew differently enough to be popular, it wouldn't be an Elixir anymore. If you designed a new kite that made an impact like the Elixir did, I could see reusing the name. That's asking for A LOT though. Maybe make a modern kite design that at least has curved leading edges. I can't handle the aesthetics of straight leading edges. I don't care if they work better, I refuse to fly kites with straight LE's.
