Beautifully Braided .394 Heavy Wall Carbon Tubes Now Available

July 1st, 2010

Goodwinds unearthed some beautifully braided .394″ OD heavy wall carbon tubes from our recent purchase of Avia Sport Composites.  They range in length from 40 inches to 48 inches and have an inner diameter of .175″.  We have about 500 pieces available at $16.99 each (but we’ll make you a deal if you want a few), so if you are interested, give us a call a 206-633-6151 or email info@goodwinds.com or order direct here

Check out that braid!:

 


Paul de Bakker Joins Goodwinds Staff

June 18th, 2010

Goodwinds.com welcomes Paul de Bakker to our staff!  Paul has joined us as the Deputy Director of Sales, and he brings to Goodwinds his extensive knowledge of carbon and fiberglass (he has a degree in Composites Engineering!) as well as his vast experience designing, building, and flying kites.

Paul is originally from Holland, and he has lived in the United States for the past couple of years with his wife, Delita.  During that time, he formed his own boutique kite company, Focus Kite Designs, with a longtime friend and fellow kiteflyer, Hunter Brown.  The two design and build upscale, high-quality kites for shipment all over the world.

We at Goodwinds lured Paul and Delita away from North Carolina with the promise of hiking Washington’s beautiful mountains, kiteboarding in the fantastic Puget Sound, and participating in kite competitions, such as the Washington State International Kite Festival, in the Pacific Northwest.  Paul is quite the competitor, routinely placing in both indoor and outdoor kite competitions:

 

 We are so excited to have Paul with us at Goodwinds.com.  He’s young, he’s fun, and he’s extremely knowledgeable.  He will be working with a variety of industries, including hobby and RC stores, to meet their carbon and fiberglass needs.  Drop us a line and say hello to Paul today!

Blue Line Bonanza!

June 1st, 2010

One of the great product lines Goodwinds inherited from Avia Sport Composites is Blue Line.  Blue Line is a renowned, pre-stretched spectra product, and Avia sold it as a line set and by the spool.  We currently have a great selection of the line sets, which include a winder, straps, and two (or four) sleeved lines for you kite. 

This is quite the experiment for Goodwinds.  As you know, we have always sold bulk spectra line.  This is our first foray into line sets, and we hope it turns out wonderfully.  We know that Blue Line has a great reputation as some of the world’s best flying line.  Let us know what you think!



Goodwinds Welcomes New Employees

April 16th, 2010

With the recent purchase of Avia Sport Composites, Goodwinds has been ramping up our packing and cutting operations.  To that end, we have hired a few employees and we would like to introduce them to you over the next couple of weeks.  Today, please welcome John and Derrick:

This is John.  John comes to us twice a week while he works on his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Western Washington University.  He mostly helps us cut carbon and move things around, but it’s sure nice knowing that there is a computer expert in the room.

This is Derrick.  Derrick technically has a full-time job across the parking lot at a screenprinting company, but he likes us better, so he comes over to help out when he can.  He’s been a great help cutting carbon and keeping us entertained with riddles.

We are fortunate at Goodwinds to have some of the best employees in the world.

Goodwinds.com Purchases Avia Sport Composites

April 6th, 2010

Goodwinds.com has purchased competitor Avia Sport Composites and is currently moving all of Avia’s business assets to Goodwinds’ Mount Vernon location.  Avia was located in Hickory, North Carolina and was in business for 15 years.  We have already hired our first couple of employees, and we’ll introduce them to you here within the next few days.  They are great guys and doing an excellent job cutting carbon!

Kurt Degener, owner of Avia Sport Composites, has decided to retire from business to pursue personal interests and world travel.  He asked Goodwinds to purchase Avia because of the high level of service Goodwinds can offer to former Avia customers.  We want to make sure that this transition is smooth, but we know it will be a bit of a bumpy ride.  We have already ordered far more carbon than we have ever kept in stock before – this means that within a few weeks, we will very likely always have lots of inventory of even the most obscure sizes of carbon!  Additionally, we now own several proprietary Avia connectors and fittings, as well as the G-Force wrapped carbon tubes.  We will begin new production on the connectors and tubes as soon as possible.

To accomodate all the new orders, we have added additional warehouse space and a dedicated cutting area across the parking lot from our current location. 

We at Goodwinds.com are excited about this new stage of business and we are confident that we can continue to offer excellent service.  Visit www.goodwinds.com for more information on Goodwinds as well as the fine carbon and fiberglass offered.

0.098 Carbon has arrived!

March 12th, 2010

Some of you might know that Goodwinds has been out of 0.098″ diameter solid carbon rod for some time – our manufacturer moved and had to set up a whole new microcarbon pultrusion machine.  It’s now up and running and we have lots of 0.098.  This is a great size for standoffs in kites and also has lots of applications in model airplanes.  Visit our solid carbon page to order your 0.098 carbon today!

Customer Spotlight on: Warlord Sports

March 9th, 2010

You may or may not be familiar with medieval combat games or Live Action Role-Playing (LARP), but at Goodwinds.com, we count those who participate in LARP and combat games among our best customers.  These customers have a lot of fun with their sport!

Many of the foam weapons used in LARP and medieval combat games use a fiberglass core.  Warlord Sports (www.warlordsports.com) is a quality purveyor of foam swords using Goodwinds’ fiberglass.

Warlord Sports Omniblade

“Warlord Sports uses fiberglass tubing in the vast majority of our
products. When properly padded it has incredible resiliency, just the
right amount of rigidity, and a strength-to-weight ratio that simply
cannot be beat. We manufacture an entire line of top-end combat sports
products that rely on fiberglass tubing as the core component and no
other material can replace it.” -Brennon Meiners, Warlord Sports

We are happy to be a part of the LARPing world and supplying fiberglass to Warlord Sports.  We also work with Edhellen Armoury and Merchants Wares, so there’s lots of Goodwinds fiberglass in LARP across America.  Check it out, you might just find a fun new hobby!

NW Model Hobby Expo a Great Success!

February 23rd, 2010

For the second year in a row, Goodwinds has displayed at the NorthWest Model Hobby Expo in Monroe, Washington.  This year, the show was held over Valentine’s Day/Presidents’ Day weekend, so Leland made sure to ply the women in the office (myself and our mom) with chocolates beforehand.  There were more vendors than in years past, and more attendees, too. 

Model shows are a great lot of fun for us, because we get to interact with RC and hobby enthusiasts who use our carbon to build awesome machines.  There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in seeing the pleasure on a person’s face when he dreams of the things he will build with a piece of micro carbon.  Just one of the many reasons we love this business!

In addition to selling as little as one piece of carbon at a time to end-users, we also supply many hobby and RC stores across the country with carbon and fiberglass rods and tubes.  Micro carbon, carbon that is under about .080 inches in diameter, flexible and strong, and often used for pushrods in model planes and other applications, is one of our more popular product categories among hobby enthusiasts, and we are happy to sell it. 

What a Great KTAI

January 25th, 2010

After a long trip from Seattle to Las Vegas, a harrowing, bumpy descent into Nevada, and a mad dash over the rain-soaked freeway, we finally arrived in Primm to attend the annual Kite Trade Association International show. 

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We set up a marvelous booth with the focus on ourselves and our two computers – after all, porting endless amounts of carbon and fiberglass rods and tubes to the show was inadvisable, and the kite stores and manufacturers know all about our products without needing to see them.  We demonstrated the ease of ordering through Goodwinds.com, but the most fun and important part of the trip was putting faces to names and building relationships with our valued customers.

Not only do we provide carbon, fiberglass, connectors, flying line, fabric, tapes, and other kite parts to kite retailers for repairs and kite building, but we also supply several manufacturers with carbon and fiberglass as raw materials.

We had a great time, and we enjoyed meeting some of the greats in the kiting industry.  In two weeks, we’ll head to the NW Model Hobby Expoin Monroe, Washington, and we plan to attend iHobby in Illinois in October.  Not to mention the American Kitefliers Association’s convention in Seaside, Oregon in October and perhaps the Washington Kiteflier’s Association Fort Worden event in March.  Phew!  It’s going to be a busy year.  Perhaps we’ll see you at a show?

KTAI, Here We Come!

January 15th, 2010

There’s something we can all count on in America: if the weather is bad, it’s probably nice in Las Vegas.

While we haven’t seen the below freezing temperatures of most of the country these past weeks, we have been hit with rain, howling wind, flood advisories, and the winter blues up here in Mount Vernon, Washington.  Fortunately, the Kite Trade Association International’s trade show in Primm (outside of Las Vegas) is next week, and we’re going to give our bones a chance to warm up.  We’ll be out of the office from Tuesday through Friday, January 19 through 22, but we will answer emails and return urgent phone calls.  We will have limited capacity to ship orders, so be sure to tell us if you need something right away.

If you’re planning to attend KTAI, we would love to meet you.  It’s always great to put faces to names, and we look forward to learning more about the kiting industry and seeing all the ways in which the carbon we supply is used in the industry.

And, hey, it’s Roger’s birthday on January 20th!  He’ll be sixty years old, and Leland and I are planning on celebrating dad’s six awesome decades with an extra day in Las Vegas.  We’re going to let him choose all the activities, which means we’ll be going to every car museum and eating loads of buffet food.  A great time!  Happy birthday, dad.