Dropped my old kites of at the tip

Ill take the board

Could have sold them on ebay. Perfect learners package only $1795. 2 kites and 1 board.

Place on here - free to grom....?

What's wrong with them? Canopy, or just bladders?

^^^^^Because of no depower and small wind range as stated in the quote you quoted, not good for a grom newbe starting out for safety reasons.
Torch is doing the right thing not selling or giving them to some young grom........unless he dosent like them that is.lol

So I'm one of those grom newbies who's out riding on shagged hadlow pro's without a donkey dick. I haven't been injured, nor injured anyone else. Today I actually rescued someone else's board, struggling the entire time to figure out how the hell to carry the thing, and managed my very first pathetic jump.

Sure, I've had one looping incident where the chicken loop came out when launching, resulting in me running downwind and choosing to crash it in the dunes. I've personally witnessed groms on oversized appropriate equipment getting teabagged much harder than that -- kites aren't inherently dangerous, it's all in how you use them. I understand that we as a community want to make people more afraid of them to discourage accidents caused by overconfidence, but the scare tactics are just a little bit silly.

I don't see what the problem is if he's up front and tells the newbie grom that the gear isn't meant for someone with poor kite control and to be extra careful and maybe test the equipment with supervision -- everything else is then on the newbie. I keep hearing that kites are dangerous but I haven't found one that has inverted on me and been dangerous since I moved away from the 'newbie' bridled kites. Yesterday's gusts felt like brick walls and almost folded my kite in half once and I *still* felt safer than on a bridled kite.

Horses for courses.

It's not even clear the gear was broken. Fiber patching a surfboard isn't exactly comparable to the cosmetic surgery I've personally performed on my motorbike, and I've successfully patched blowouts and slow leaks, even replaced a valve before I knew how to go up wind. The wonders of YouTube.

Better than buying a kite I'm not sure I want, getting other people to decide if it fits their mental image of a newbie, therefore actually making marketing hype worth something, and then being too scared to fly the thing because it's expensive, or being without it for a week because I ruined the inflation valve due to nobody teaching me about dump valves. (Not me, a guy I met on the beach who was having trouble with the kite shops -- replaced his valve plug and voilà.)

Maybe the sport isn't as male dominated as you all like to claim.

Edit: Lessons are important. Give a newbie any kite without lessons and they're screwed. 12 metres pulls just as hard no matter how the lines are attached to you. We're arguing about the pull of the kite when it's not powered up.

Might want to consider the benefits of having only experienced riders buying new. Better kite designs being rewarded with more sales and less hype targeting beginners might be a good thing.