I made a bit more progress with the kite cradle. I picked up a 1/4″ dowel and some vinyl tubing from Home Depot, and scavenged various other bits of wood from the ex-kitchen cabinets. Pictured is more or less what the thing should look like once hitched to the kite, although I still haven’t decided how to mount the servos and R/C receiver — duct tape is a leading candidate. This design, incidentally, is straight from the pages of Make: magazine, except that I pretty much ignored the directions and got all the wrong sizes for everything, and also that mine will be R/C controlled instead of timed with silly putty.