We decided to test the kick on the lake today.
The ice was 5cm thick so even though it cracked and made sounds when we walked on it we decided that it was safe to ride on. Without knowing anything about the kicks performance we rode two on the kick to bring the acceleration down a bit, if we knew what would come we would have made a single ride but more about that later.
We took the pressure to 65 bar knowing that it would drop about 10 bar before we had carried the kick down to the lake, I used a piece of board to sit on and operated the valve by hand. The kick accelerated well for aprox. 100m, then there was another 100m of low thrust that kept us cruising at constant speed before the kick started to slow down and came to a halt 300m from the start. The GPS recorded a top speed of 60km/h so without the passenger it should hopefully go over 80km/h, enough to get some wind through the beard at least.
After lunch we decided to give it another go without the passenger but found that the valve seals was damaged, as soon as the pressure started to rise it leaked water through the ball valve so we aborted the run.
Back home we took the valve apart and found that the seals that were made of nylon had started to melt from the steam heat, I will make a bunch of them on the lathe so we can change to new ones after each run to avoid this problem in the future.
Another interesting Saturday has passed. =)
http://s231.photobucket.com/albums/ee19 ... V03913.flv