Shaped slider, trapezium style

[potatoman 0]

This might have been done before, but could not find anything.

Anybody experimented with different shapes of sliders?
I am not so much fussed about bigger and smaller, and grommet sizes, but more the cut/shape.

Think trapezium. Wider in the front than at the back. Possibly, take more wind from the nose, but would pull more tail during deployment.

Also, back to front on this, you should get more wind over the nose, than the tail, for faster inflation.

Just a thought, your views?

You have the right to your opinion, and I have the right to tell you how Fu***** stupid it is.
Davelepka - "This isn't an x-box, or a Chevy truck forum"
Whatever you do, don't listen to ChrisD.

[obelixtim 100]

Back when sliders replaced ropes and rings, it was prolly tried out. I saw a lot of experimental sliders back in the day, even on some roundies.....

And a mate had a Delta 2 wing which he tried out with rings and various spider sliders to replace the 6 foot piece of conveyer belt webbing used as an OSI (opening shock inhibitor) that the wing had.

I did a few test jumps on it, and it was definitely not a pleasant experiece....

I stayed with the OSI on mine and it worked fine.

I'm sure nearly everything would have been tried out back then, and what has evolved over time has proven to be the best....Reliable openings on squares didn't really come about till the slider came along....

If it ain't broken, why try to fix it?.

My computer beat me at chess, It was no match for me at kickboxing....

[RiggerLee 61]

A lot of it depends on what perspective you look at it from. Who says it's not broken? Who says it's not limiting? I'll give you some examples. Base. We still strugle with opening performance. Yes we're geting pretty good at it but some times we all still have those unexspected off headings. For a while we were playing with trapizodal sliders. The idea being to let the canopy spread more stabalizing it more with the slider up. The out wards pull of the breaklines is one of the driving forces controling the speed of the opening at low speeds. I'm talking short slider up delays. As an example there have been a couple of fatalities from people neglecting to route there break lines through the slider gromits. It was hoped that the narrow spaceing at the back would help the break lines to force the slider down. There were mixed resultes. BR had some stability problems resulting in vilont off headings on some of their oppings. I had fairly goo luck with it on a couple of my canopies. So I'd say it's a bit more complicated. Another example is big canopies. We're playing with some pretty big canopys in this project. We're looking at some things in the 1200 foot range. Many of these canopies use six or more gromits. The width of the center cell is just not wide enough to permit the slider to be large enough. It allows the slider to be larger then normal and also depending on which lines you put through which gromits it allows some of the other cells to spread more with the slider all the way up. If you have even more gromits it can allow the slider to be longer front to back rather then being constrained by the length of the stableizer between the b and c slider stops. Keep an mind that some of these canopies have a,b,c,d,e,f,g lines. And various forms of cascadeing.

So if you only want to look at it from the very limited perspective of your saber 2 135 then yah it's pretty well figured out. But even there, What if you were to extend an extra grommet for the break lines outward on a peace of tape. Maybe you could reduce the out wards pull from the breaks makeing the slider more dominant and causing longer more consistant snivels? Maybe placeing a gromet inbound on the slider for the breakline would pull the tail in protecting it from the wind and giveing you slower opening and more protaction from line overs on highly eliptical canopies. Perhaps a six gromet canopy would allow a more even inflasion of a higher aspect ratio canopy with smaller inlets in the nose? I'm just tossing out random shit now. Point is that you should never close your mind to the possability of evelution. If we had done that before no one would have ever come up with the PC(para comander) much less the ram air. Although I could tell this whole story with pilot chutes rather then canopies. So go out and do some thing really weird with your canopy. Come back and write about it here. Or at least leave the detailes with your friends for the fatality report. Who know what you'll come up with. I remember the first time some one came to me and asked if I could build a slider that he could remove from his canopy in flight. I thought he was nuts.

Lee

Lee
[email protected]
www.velocitysportswear.com

[obelixtim 100]

I wasn't aware the OP was referring to anything other than standard skydiving canopies.

Of course other things will apply if the parameters are changed radically as they would be if you are talking about 1200 sq foot canopies.

Base should not be such a problem, because base canopies are not a big step from normal skydiving canopies, I can't see much more than small "tweaks" being made to existing technology...

. We learnt a lot about how to control the headings on opening with CRW.

My computer beat me at chess, It was no match for me at kickboxing....

[RMURRAY 1]

Quote

This might have been done before, but could not find anything.

Anybody experimented with different shapes of sliders?
I am not so much fussed about bigger and smaller, and grommet sizes, but more the cut/shape.

Think trapezium. Wider in the front than at the back. Possibly, take more wind from the nose, but would pull more tail during deployment.

Also, back to front on this, you should get more wind over the nose, than the tail, for faster inflation.

Just a thought, your views?

I like the 'outside the box" thinking. I am sure it has been tried. Also sure the manufacturers will not comment but maybe someone like MEL (Skyworks Rigging) can comment?

[darkwing 4]

A long time ago I made a canopy with only a single riser on each side. So the slider only had two grommets and was shaped like a pointy ellipse. It was also domed. It worked fine, but I didn't really see any advantage, although maybe these days we could save lives if there weren't front and rear risers to do tricks with.

-- Jeff
My Skydiving History