Dear kristi... and Jonathan,

I have indeed "installed" the mentioned Side String in form of a wool string of 25-30 cm length for the last 5 years on an ASG 29 and ASH 31. It works quite well - once "calibrated" on stall and best glide speed, it's fast and IMHO pretty accurate in straight level flight taking speed and g-load into account. It seems robust in different flap settings (actually it is a great optical reminder for keeping proper flap settings...). When banking/thermaling (especially with a slight side slip) it might loose some of its absolute accuracy due to turbulence and flow changes on the front fuselage but it still provides a good and fast tendency regarding getting closer to stalling the glider (completely in sync with the weakening feeling in the controls when approaching a stall). Drawback might be that attaching the string to the lower canopy creates a turbulence wake on a possibly laminar flow in the front part of the fuselage but given that the bug wipers kill that flow anyway 50 cm behind the string, I recon that this is almost irrelevant...

Best regards
Marc (S2)