Cutting the Sail

 

As I mentioned earlier, I hot cut all of my sail pieces.  The Pizazz sail consists of a center sail piece and three panels on each wing.  To insure that the center sail piece is symmetrical I fold the cloth in half and cut from a template that represents one half of the center section.

In this image I have the cloth folded and I'm aligning the center of the panel with the fold in the layer of cloth.
 
 

Once I have the template in the proper place I cut the folded layers of cloth with the hot cutter.
 
 

Then separate the melted edges with your hand, ruler, or what ever.  Some caution is needed here.  Try to always run "down hill" to the grain of the cloth to avoid pulling the fiber out of the cloth as you split the layers.
 

I cut the wing panels in a similar fashion using one piece of cloth folded in half.  That way I cut two pieces of sail at the same time and use them both on the same kite.  If you look closely at this picture you will see that I am making many of the same wing panels.  This reduces overall waste of the cloth.  I'm sure many of you know that cutting one kite at a time can be very wasteful.

  It's slow and painful but for long straight cuts I use a straight edge.  As nice as my table saw is for making templates for some reason it always seems to have a bow in it.

After a short time you too can have a wide selection of precut kite panels!

If you are interested in sewing along as we go along. and don't want to go through the cutting process, I have several options available from precut sail pieces to an entire precut kite.  You can contact me at pizazz@pizazzkites.com.

For comments and input please email me at builders@pizazzkites.com