Mon Jun 28 19:49:58 PDT 2004

Finally got around to moving the 555 timer from the old KAP camera to the new Kodak EasyShare CX6200. Turned out to be incredibly easy to do. There was plenty of space in the Kodak, and while I needed to cut the plastic a little, it went fairly cleanly and smoothly using a pair of diagonal wire cutters.

I ended up mounting it on a small 2in x 2ft board with a 5/16 in hole cut at each end. On the one end I used a bolt with wings to hold the camera to the board via the tripod screw mount. The other end I pulled the kite line through and wrapped it over the end of the board to hold it tight. This may have been a bad plan, since on the 2nd flight when the wind really picked up, the line snapped right a the point where it was looped around the board, so either rubbing on the board or something caused it to break under the heightened stress.

On the plus side there were lots of good photos. The camera was only minorly damaged. The plastic where the screw mount on the bottem is broke, but some glue should help put it back together. The really bad news is that I lost the kite. I seem to have trouble keeping a kite and a camera together and working for any length of time.

So, lessons learned – it gets windy around here in the evening and I really should have switched to the 200lb line before continuing to fly. Fortunately, the latter is a mistake I can’t make again since I lost over half of my line and no longer really have enough of the small line on the reel to fly a significant single-line kite.