Easy Kitemaking: How to Build a Pyramid Kite

The Tetrahedral Kite: Easy to Make, Easy to Fly!

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... flying pyramid?

Alexander Graham Bell is famous as the inventor of the telephone, but few realize he invented an early form of airplane! Well, not quite. It wasn't a plane -- a flat wing -- but a tetrahedron, a pyramid-like* structure with four sides. (Count 'em. The sides are shaped like triangles, but there's four triangles, not three!)

In 1907, five years after the Wright Brothers got their airplane airborne, Bell's tetrahedral kite, Cygnet, flew to a height of 168 feet for 7 minutes with one passenger aboard. It was made of nearly 4,000 individual pyramid cells! It also had to be towed by a steamboat on a line, the way adventuresome waterskiiers can use a kite to get airborne today. Bell's later model Cygnet II, had a V-8 engine, and Cygnet III finally got a pilot off the ground under its own power.

You don't need 4,000 cells to make a pyramid fly. You don't even need a sphinx. All you need is some paper or mylar, a few plastic drinking straws, glue and string. Run grab those items at a grocery store. When you get back, I'll show you How to build a kite in eight easy steps!

*HEY KIDS! Wanna know "how to make a pyramid?" OK, I admit it: Tetrahedrons aren't really pyramids! (See my Tetrahedrons vs. Pyramids Photo Gallery below). But it's easy to change my design to make a real pyramid. At step #2, connect four straws at the peak instead of three. Use four straws for the bottom, too, to form a square. Cut the bottom straws a bit shorter to make the pyramid taller. Here's a stone wall texture you can copy and paste to fill a page in a graphics program, and print out to use a a "wrapper" for your pyramid.

Materials You'll Need to Build This Kite

There are a thousand different kinds of kites, but this one is simple enough for a child to make and elegant enough for an adult to enjoy. The first one I made in second grade (Thank you, Mrs. Mckee, wherever you are) lasted for almost ten years of blustery springs and summers spent bashing into a cornfield.

Materials

24 plastic drinking straws
spool of kitestring or kitchen string
large sewing needle (not vital)
strong, light tissue paper or mylar (Colored plastic wrap found in party stores works nicely, but tug on it to make sure it doesn't tear easily. Regular printer paper is a little too heavy. My teacher pre-cut the pieces for us out of two layers of tissue paper.)
rubber cement (more basic glue/tape works with tissue paper, but rubber cement works with everything)

Kite Assembly: Easy Kitemaking Instructions

String three plastic drinking straws together to form a triangle. The easiest way is to give your thread extra slack, use a heavy needle, and drop it down through one straw, letting gravity do the work for you. Tie the triangle's ends together securely, leaving as little slack as possible.

Thread and tie on two more straws to form a second triangle, using one of the first three straws for one side of the triangle. Then tie one more straw between the outer corner of the two triangles to form the back of the pyramid. Again, don't tie the thread so tightly that the straws bend, but don't leave so much give that your pyramid flops. It should stand up on its own once you've got all six straws in place.

Place your pyramid on your paper or wrap of choice. Trace or cut out a triangle about half an inch larger than the pyramid's base, nipping off the corners as shown. The shape is like the orange safety triangles on slow-moving vehicles. If this is an activity for children, you may want to prepare a cardboard pattern ahead of time which they can trace and copy. Repeat to get a second triangle.
For each of two sides of the pyramid: Curl the edges of the paper triangle over and around the straws, then secure with rubber cement.

Repeat steps 1-4, to create three more pyramids, each with two sides covered with paper.
Stack the four individual pyramids into one large pyramid: three on the bottom, one on top. Orient all of them in the same direction, so that, for instance, the papered sides on all of them are on the left and right. (They're like the wings of birds flying in formation. If they're facing different directions, the wind won't be able to pass through freely.)
When you've got all the pyramids arranged properly, tie together all the corners that touch, double and triple knotting, just to make sure.
Attatch your kitestring to one of the corners where two sides of paper meet, as shown in the diagram, and you're done!
If you want to be ambitious, you can make three more 4-cell kites like this one, then use them as the four cells of a larger tetrahedron to build a giant kite! Ever heard of fractals? You can just keep repeating the same pattern, larger and larger, to make the Great Pyramid!

Pictures of Tetrahedrons and Pyramids

Look at the shapes of these tetrahedrons (top row) and pyramids (bottom row). Can you see the difference? Notice the last picture of the Great Pyramid from above -- see how the bottom forms a square?

Giant Tetrahedron You Can Climb!

Paper Tetrahedron

Bell's Cygnet II Kite

Tetrahedron model

Canine Geometry!

Sierpinski Tetrahedron

Modern Pyramid Buiding

Pyramids of Giza

Computer Graphics Pyramds

Pyramids of Giza

Pyramids of Giza

curated content from Flickr

Flying Your Tetrahedral Kite

I just pick the kite up off the ground by its string and let it go. The wind will flow in the same direction as the string, balancing the two "wings" of each pyramid like the sides of a sailboat sitting on water. It's a very stable, forgiving shape, and the straws' slight flexibility should cushion the kite against jarring landings.

If you have the bad habit of flying kites in very strong winds, which tends to make them crash, you may want to drop some thin supports down the insides of the straws to keep them from buckling. I suspect thin shish kabob stakes would work well. I just jam a thin twig inside if one of the straws bends.

You can also make this kite out of fancier materials, of course; the shape is the crucial part. Enjoy!

A Pocket Kite -- Always Ready!

Go Fly A Kite Light Pocket Parafoil Kite

Amazon Price: (as of 11/09/2009)

Okay, I confess -- I don't always fly pyramid kites. I actually collect a lot of different kites. Some are gorgeous, shaped like dragons or phoenixes or ships! But they take a lot of wind, a lot of space, and I don't take them out very often.

This one I do. I keep it in the trunk of my car. It rolls up and fits in the bottom of a backpack. It's stable, tough, forgiving, and can do simple stunts (figure 8s, S-curves) once you get the feel for it. Best of all -- no struts, so it can't break! If it crashes, it just collapses like a sack; shake the sand off and it's ready to go again. Mine has lasted for fifteen years.

Great Books on Kitemaking

Easy-to-Make Decorative Kites: Step-by-Step Instructions for Nine Models from Around the World

by: Alan and Gill Bridgewater

Amazon Price: $4.95 (as of 11/09/2009)

25 Kites That Fly

by: Leslie L. Hunt

Amazon Price: $26.45 (as of 11/09/2009)

Building Kites: Flying High With Math (Grades 5-8/Math Projects Series)

by: Nancy Ann Belsky

Amazon Price: (as of 11/09/2009)

Making of Japanese Kites: Tradition, Beauty and Creation

by: Masaaki Modegi

Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 11/09/2009)

The Kite Making Handbook

Amazon Price: (as of 11/09/2009)

I Wonder How They Made THIS Kite?

WindFire Cursor Kite: Best Kite Ever

The Cursor Kite is cleverly designed to look exactly like a mouse pointer! I've seen and flown some beautiful kites, but if I could get my hands on this baby, even my two-masted full-rigged ship kite would never leave the house. No, these images are...