Setting Up the Wings for a Hang Glider

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Duke. Welcome to Expert Village. OK, so in this clip we're going to start putting in our battens. This glider is still essentially the prototypical training glider. It's very light weight. It uses wires and the king posts to give it it's structural bracing. Which is a very light weight method of construction. Much like bridges and the Golden Gate is suspended by and wires and cross bracing. Light weight structure very strong. The more advanced gliders have gotten rid of all the wires up top and they're called topless gliders. And so they have to have a much more heavy duty support inside. And that's why the more advanced gliders weight a lot more. So we put the battens from longest to shortest. You want to dust the sand off so that you don't sand out the batten pocket as you put it in. They're attached with these strings back here. It's very difficult to set it up incorrectly, it's very straight forward. Like a modern tent. It's designed not to be set up wrong. It's hard to set it up wrong. It takes about ten minutes to set it up. The next thing before I get to these, you see that the wings are down on the ground. We're going to tension the wing, which pulls the cross bar. This big structural piece here that's hinged there, pulls it back, tightens up the wings and makes into a strong air frame. To do that I just pull this guy back here and attach it here. These are called luff lines and the whole thing together is called the reflex bridle. Reflex is the curve that comes back out of the wing. I'll take one of these battens out and show you. It's very much like up elevator on an airplane. This is what keeps this glider wanting to fly with its nose up and prevents it from just spiraling into the ground. This structure here, the reflex bridle, makes it impossible for this wing to come and flip inside out. This piece sits on a little knob right there in the wing, that I'm going to line it up to. This is called a washout strut, and it's designed again to keep the back of the wing up, to keep the nose of the glider up. I need to set the nose batten into place. So if she wasn't holding the tail, the wind would come right under there and flip this glider over on top of me. OK, so the nose batten's in place. Jana's set up the other wing. We need to check the glider over and make sure it was all put together. That's called the preflight."