Do your lines catch on the cage hoop? Do the slide up easily? If not, this may help, especially for machines with cloth cage rim covering.
It’s extremely helpful to put smooth tubing around the hoop. Tubing allows the lines to come up cleanly around the cage during forward inflations. It can make a dramatic difference in your no-wind success rate while reducing abrasion wear to paraglider lines. Paraglider repair shops have reported this wear and I’ve noticed it myself (I fly mostly with these types of cages).
The best tubing I’ve found was used on Kenny Carlock’s Sky Cruiser. It’s from www.McMasterCarr.com, Item 52315K251, an extreme-temperature tubing made with PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene), 5/8″ ID, 11/16″ OD, 1/32″ wall thickness. This unreinforced tubing is opaque black and comes in 2, 5, 10 or 25 foot lengths.
A cheaper alternative, available from Ace Hardware (among others), is 3/4″ water tubing. It’s translucent white, a bit heavier, but works almost as good.
You can easily slice the tube using a razor stuck into a piece of PVC pipe at an angle. Slide the tubing through the PVC to carefully cut so the slit on the tubing’s natural inside curve. Snap the tubing around the rim and secure with electrical tape. It doesn’t need to go all around the cage but cover at least 2/3’s of the rim from the bottom.
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- Hard hoop tubing from Ace Hardware
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- Lines snagging on miniplane cage
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- Lines sliding up cage
Cage hoops with fabric tend to snag lines like in photo 2-putting smooth tubing around the fabric solves the problem. The white translucent tube shown in photo 1 is cheaper but a bit heavier and not quite as slippery as the good stuff shown in photo 3 (Kenny Carlock launching).