‘Skyaak Canadian Ring Wing Glider’ as Artist’s Muse

Check this short clip out of California. It was such a rush to see the Skyaak Ultra-Glow experimental prototype flying around in the night skies over Berkeley Campus!

The video artist had to say this about his experience:

Here’s a little bit of night flight with my new Skyaak Model 3 with the light kit. Flight is great, but more than that, this thing looks great at night and was surprisingly easy to catch (especially for people that had never thrown a Skyaak before). Distributed by Tubemogul.

Living in rural Western Canada has its pros and cons. Mostly pros.

I used to think that I was pretty far removed from the action of the great big world living here, but since the world is steadily shrinking thanks to communication and information-sharing advances this is really no longer an issue.

A case in point would be the above video that shows the Skyaak Model 3 Ultra-Glow flying around over Berkeley Campus! Now if that’s not getting out there into the slipstream, I don’t know what is.

The great thing about living here is that I get to pretty much do what I want most days.

As a professional artist/entrepreneur I am enjoying a life ‘off the grid’, meaning I get to spend time devoted to the things I feel passionate about.  Sure, I have to do the daily grind to earn the money I need to pursue my interests, just like everybody else. But I also get to spend substantial chunks of time dedicated to ‘following my muse’.

Which is pretty wrapped up in the Skyaak project.

When pressed to come up with a number one reason for spending all this time and energy on the Skyaak project I  say this: I get a great big buzz out of creating an object that I can toss into the air and watch as it takes on a life of its own in flight!

There’s something in my lizard brain that gets a wicked rush from the idea that I am in the process of developing a flight methodology, a design configuration that actually works.  There is a visceral thrill to the notion that I have nurtured this concept over the years from its crude infancy to the rather advanced form that you see flying around over Berkeley Campus above!

More than this, I’m looking forward to all of the future advancements yet to come. I have lots of ideas in the wings for more sophisticated models that will keep me busy for years to come.

With all the amazing advances in materials, replication technology and IT, I feel like I have access to a steadily expanding tool-box that will never exhaust itself of creative potential.

What more can I ask for?

Copyright Tony Karp 2008

Skyaak ‘betcha can’t make just one’ contest reminder

Seeing as how this space has now hosted quite close to 1500 visitors, thought it would be a good idea to remind y’all about the ongoing FREE SKYAAK PRIZE CONTEST.

As a gesture of appreciation to all of you that have purchased a Skyaak DIY deuce, here it is:

Skyaak DIY deuce
‘betcha can’t make just one’

OK. It’s official. You read it here.

To make your Skyaak DIY deuce experience even more fun, we’re announcing a contest with prize awards of *FREE* Skyaak Model 3 units to best videos of your DIY deuce in 3 categories:

1) Most creative customizing
2) Best finesse throw with best glide
3) Most creative editing

All you have to do to qualify is grab a Skyaak DIY deuce that you can download, dope w clear tape, customize ( go on, you know you wanna customize it!) cut out, build and fly! That’s a lot of fun for 2 bucks.

Youtube your video entry and include skyaak in the tag so we can find it and we will announce the winners in this space every 3 months. Send as many entries as you want. Build as many DIY deuce units as you want. Have fun and good luck!

3 winners every 3 months. *FREE* Skyaak Model 3 shipped *FREE* anywhere on the planet.

Flat package concept, w 3-D Model 3 ready for maiden voyage!

Skyaak DIY deuce
‘betcha can’t make just one’

Skyaak re-birth-ing

As mentioned earlier, we are now in the home stretch in the process to overhaul skyaak.com.

People still tell me that it’s a good-looking site,

but everyone around here believes it’s time for an extreme makeover.

For one thing, mind-mapping

and eye-maps tell us that the logo-man ought to be chucking the Skyaak up to the upper left-hand side of the page to draw eyes in a natural swooping trajectory.

At present, the ‘logo-man’ is throwing Skyaak Model 3 in a closed loop off to the right hand side of the page, like a visual staircase to nowhere. Not so good. We’ll probably abandon the idea of an animated gif altogether on the new site. More than likely we will have a brief, friendly introductory video to give it a personal feel. I imagine you will get the impression that I am pretty excited about the Skyaak design and how well it flies.

There will also be a big emphasis, as always, on how good this unit looks.  As an artist, I am always looking for a new perspective on this project.  A major perk for me is quite simply the look of the thing as it flies through the air.

Google ‘Maker’ Christmas Art take 3

From the Google Christmas Art series 08

Here’s today’s Google ‘Maker’ art. Looks like things are heating up, you can see that they are getting some steam happening. Whatever it is they are making, it appears to be working!

Speaking of ‘making’, you can make your own Skyaak DIY deuce…the cool ring-wing glider that you can download, laminate, custom-decorate, cut out, build and FLY for two bucks.

A buddy of mine popped over yesterday and I showed him the Model 3 and the DIY deuce. He told me that he is hard-core Frisbee enthusiast. At first he was a bit skeptical about the Skyaak design. It IS a rather unlikely-looking glider! Like nothing you’ve ever seen!

However, once we had tossed the deuce around the living-room a few times, his face lit up like a Christmas tree. He told me that it flies surprisingly well, and he pointed out that the ‘finger flicker’ does exactly the same thing as a ‘throwing stick’ or ‘atlatl’; that is, it creates unexpected extra power with little or no exertion!

He also enthused about the fact that the deuce tends to lift its nose up by the time it reaches the recipient, making it (conveniently) easy to grab out of the air by the shaft! Yeah, that is definitely a bonus feature that you will notice and enjoy!

You can clearly see in this brief clip how the DIY deuce lifts up its nose when it’s gliding through the air. This is the ‘positive incidence’ that we talked about earlier. Just means that the design of the ring-wings create ‘lift’ as it propels forward. Basically, the more thrust you have, the greater the lift. The ‘finger flicker’ (read: atlatl) feature is your ticket to a lot more airborne power.

Skyaak Skinny

Why in the world would a grown man get up every morning with a spring in his step, all excited to carry on with the continuous evolution of an offbeat, odd-ball, esoteric idea like a ‘ring-wing’ glider?

That is a question I asked myself today as I went about my day…

I think back about 30-odd years when a friend of mine innocently showed me a very crude little glider. He didn’t even have a name for it but I instantly dubbed it a ‘ring-wing’. Which makes sense when you consider that it is just a stick with loop of paper at each end. With a dab of gum stuck to the front to balance it. Sounds simple, right?

Turns out it’s not as simple as it seems at first glance, at least not to me.

All I know is that once we had tossed it back and forth a couple of times, I was hooked!

You might say it was ‘love at first flight’.

I built a model to re-create what that first little unit looked like:

I wasn’t sure why, but the thing fascinated me.

I built quite a few more models over the next couple of years and thought of a few ways to improve the design in idle moments. While working for a design firm in Montreal, before the advent of CG graphics, PhotoShop et al, I decided to get the new innovations I had been tinkering with down on paper and drafted up a study of how it might work:

As you can see I was thinking about suspending the shaft inside the center of the ring-wings. Turns out this makes it more balanced and makes it possible to get the thing spinning on its axis in flight. That never happened when the stick was just taped to the bottom of the loops.

After I drew the plan I filed the design away for a few years. In fact, until after I had moved to Saskatchewan, got married, had a daughter and watched her grow up to the age of seven years old. (By now I was the ripe old age of 37.)

My daughter ilara and I had often spoken about the idea of ‘influences’, ‘heroes’ and ‘idols’. I mentioned that I was a big fan of Leonardo da Vinci and had been since I was a little kid, her age.

She thought about this and casually asked me, “Well, if you such a big fan, why don’t you have any inventions?” She had been reading up on Leonardo and knew about his mechanical genius for invention.

That threw me for a bit of a loop, I had not really thought much about the ring-wing glider for quite some time. I recovered in a few seconds and responded, “But I have!” and rushed off to unearth the old drawing from Montreal in one of my bulging portfolios.

It is simply amazing what a huge influence a little bit of encouragement can exert on our lives!

ilara was very, very impressed with the drawing and it this enthusiasm that lit a spark under me to ignite my renewed interest in the thing.

I started to tinker some more with it in my spare time and managed to build some very crude prototype models to see if my ideas would work.

Fast forward to the present. Many incarnations and design tweaks later, I can now show you what the latest model looks like:

This is a rather playful model decorated with color pigments, made of various types of plastic. This puppy can fly over sixty feet at speeds of over 45 kph in the hands of an expert.

The front of a contemporary model:

Kinda slick, don’t you think?

Now, the reason I am wrting all of this is to try to explain just a bit what all the fuss is about with Skyaak

It’s really about the “follow your bliss” thing.

I just get a lot of personal enjoyment…a real rush…out of shepherding the whole process forward. It’s kind of my post-graduate thesis on ‘how to stay happy and excited in life’.

Of course there are a lot more reasons why I am basically a happy person, but this project is a big factor.

Put it this way: it is a huge rush when you get to see your idea literally ‘fly off the drafting table’ as a working glider. Um…a drafting table is an outmoded reference…think monitor.

So can you imagine how cool it was when the idea of the DIY deuce came around, that converts your PC to a Skyaak vending machine? Now, people from all over the world are scratching their little curiosity itch, scraping up the two bucks for their very own DIY deuce that they can download, laminate, decorate, cut out build and fly! Talk about coming around full circle!

Now I get the immense satisfaction of hearing from you all that are enjoying this cool design just like I did way back when I was a kid of seventeen. That is so cool, don’t you think?

This sweet little DIY deuce unit features the ‘finger flicker’ that you use like an atlatl to rocket it through the air with very fast scale air-speed!

Make sure you check out the details of the Skyaak “betcha can’t make just one” Prize Contest that invites you to submit a video that chronicles your DIY deuce adventures with the chance to win a *FREE* Skyaak Model 3 shipped *FREE* to your door anywhere on the planet!

Skyaak hits flickr

Googly-eyed Skyaak

Having fun working with flickr, just starting there really. Out of the thousands of pictures I have in the wings about 40 or so have been posted so far.

I will be fleshing it out soon.

Then I will come back and edit this post to just say there’s tons there now.

Skyaak ‘betcha can’t make just one!’ Contest

Skyaak DIY deuce
‘betcha can’t make just one’

OK. It’s official. You read it here.

To make your Skyaak DIY deuce experience even more fun, we’re announcing a contest with prize awards of *FREE* Skyaak Model 3 units to best videos of your DIY deuce in 3 categories:

1) Most creative customizing
2) Best finesse throw with best glide
3) Most creative editing

All you have to do to qualify is grab a Skyaak DIY deuce that you can download, dope w clear tape, customize ( go on, you know you wanna customize it!) cut out, build and fly! That’s a lot of fun for 2 bucks.

Youtube your video entry and include skyaak in the tag so we can find it and we will announce the winners in this space every 3 months. Send as many entries as you want. Build as many DIY deuce units as you want. Have fun and good luck!

3 winners every 3 months. *FREE* Skyaak Model 3 shipped *FREE* anywhere on the planet.

Flat package concept, w 3-D Model 3 ready for maiden voyage!

Skyaak DIY deuce
‘betcha can’t make just one’