I had a Nimbus 2 with a tailchute. but hardly ever used it because it was a
pain to re-pack into its housing. Maybe a couple of times a year when
landing at the airfield to impress people and to give it an airing.

I was always frightened to use it for field landings as the glide angle
went from pretty flat to about 40 degrees nose down when you popped it
out, with little chance of picking up speed if you got slow. Bit of a one
shot device! If you had to dump it you stood a good chance of losing the
chute and the housing.

The Nimbus was fitted with the double paddle brake mod and with
sideslipping would approach as steeply as most other high performance
sailplanes. I would have taken the tailchute out altogether if it hadn't
been an airworthiness requirement.

Derek Copeland


At 23:24 29 September 2009, Borderfort wrote:
I am also looking for one of these- I have an ASW-17; I have one drag
chute, and it's in good shape, but things happen, and I would like to
have a spare.

I recently wrote both the manufacturer (Walter Kostelezky GmbH,
Weingarten, Germany ) and Schleicher asking about
the availability and price of a replacement.
Both said the chutes are theoretically still available, but they would
prefer to make a small production run (to justify setting up the
tooling, probably), there would be about a 6-8 month lead time, and
the cost would be around 1300 Euro + shipping.

The ASW-17 uses the model BS1600 (Baenderschirm, 1.6 Meter, I'm
guessing). I've seen a BS1200 mentioned somewhere, but I don't know
which glider uses which.

The thing is beautiful- a real piece of art. Each ribbon is a great
circle, continuous to the opposite side. Half go to the left at the
edge and half to the right, so it's a crisscross pattern. Each ribbon
is ~ 1.5 inches wide, so at the apex vent, they overlap to make the
upper 1/2 of the canopy solid. At the edge, each pair of ribbons is
sewn to a shroud line. Every six of the shrouds is attached to a
catenary, which has a double shroud at each end. There are 36 of the
upper shrouds, and 6 of the long double shrouds. (This seems perfectly
clear to me, but I know it's not if you aren't looking at one. I'll
attach a photo if I can figure out how. (This is my first post.)

I'm starting to look admiringly upon old umbrellas...

-Rob



On Sep 29, 12:51 pm, Berry wrote:
In article
,
i
" wrote:
Need the Ribbon chute for an ASW17 or Nimbus 2.

Anyone got one in their hanger?

Cheers

Al

Is that the same chute as used on a 301 Libelle? I gave a spare chute
to
Burt Compton once upon a time. Maybe he still has it.