Kites and Punches

[PorkyFatBoy]

I spent Saturday afternoon sorting out a tangle of kites, punches and garden canes that is our non-SI kit. There has to be a better way of storing this stuff

Thought I'd ask, before I break with years of tradition and/or give an M65 equipment officer a heart attack. Can you give me some ideas as to how things are done at your club?

How do you store yours kites and punches?
Are they permanently fixed to the canes?
How many punches per kite?
What are the punches fixed to? (kite or cane?)
Do you have wooden plates with the code on?

[kedge]

WIM store all their non-SI kit in the club shed (a previously disused store shed in the local cemetery(!). Our stakes and punches are fairly new,dating from the JK at Penhale in '97 (our previous kit then came to my school and was used for local schools league events until it fell apart and we graduated to using SI for almost every event. Back to the shed - numbered control stakes (numbers printed onto correx plastic) are stored in numerical order by slotting them over the rafters inf the shed roof.

Punches are permanently attached to canes, punches held against the cane by a rubber band (which always perishes) or a garden tie, so you can carry it without the punch & string tangling. These are then grouped by punch pattern and bundled together, stored vertically in an enclusre along the shed wall, or up in the rafters - you know when its time to replace the elastic bands when you open the shed door and see all the punches hanging down from the roof like large spiders.

The plastic of these punches becomes brittle over the years, so we've always used at least 2 punches per control incase a punch snapped or the teeth fell off. The JK kit had very sturdy canes, which went into sand dunes OK but are bloody difficult to plant into hard ground - we use half an old school javelin as a hole maker.

Kites are folded and kept in bags of 10 - we've just realised that many of these kites are probably as old as the club (1970 or thereabouts) and will need replacing shortly. You will see some of them on BOC Relay day. They are attached to a fishing swivel and hook with which to attach them to a cane or SI stake.

Every year a working party checks over the kit, replaces ties/elastic bands etc. or at least thats the theory. But we've hardly used the kit since we went SI in 2000.