Also, this design is far less likely to poke a hole in my fucking head or blind me when some oblivious asshole parades down a crowded city street without knowing how to use an umbrella in the city. I like it!
Now all it needs is a Bladerunner handle and pole and we’re all set.
The real question I don’t see answered is how does it respond to up-drafts? That’s the leading cause of “dead umbrellas” that I can see around midtown.
I imagine it would perform miserably. It has a lot of surface area to produce a huge amount of lift, but no rigid structure providing the tensile strength necessary to resist such forces.
They claim that “the material is flexible when not in tension”, which would imply that when under tension it becomes rigid, but I have a hard time imagining a material which would be rigid enough to withstand strong and chaotic up-drafts without an inner skeleton redirecting the forces.
Thinkgeek has Bladerunner handle umbrellas. I’ve got one. If you want to poke people back, anyway.
Maybe, but the existing solution doesn’t fare well, even with that structure, so it’s not like that’s providing any perceptible benefit, that I can see (at least judging from what I witness on my walk to the office on rainy days).
If they did a smaller cover over the top like a vented umbrella it might work. However some have noted that this design was licensed to a large manufacturer for over 10 years and they didn’t bother bringing it to market. There might be significant manufacturing problems with the design.
Well anyway that’s the risk for the kickstarter guinea pigs to underwrite.
A well made umbrella doesn’t fail. The problem is that most umbrellas are very poorly made, to keep them cheap.
I was totally confused as to how this worked, until I went to the page. It does have a support frame underneath:
It just doesn’t have any metal arms going out to the extremities.
Show someone carrying it folded up. I bet it looks like a giant harpoon.
Based on the partial images from the page, it looks like it wraps up real tight like any other umbrella.
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