Oh, how things can change. Early in the week the forecast for this flying Saturday was for rain by the bucketload. I tried not to get bummed, and as the week wore on the chances dropped daily. By Saturday I woke up to blue skies, low humidity and a brisk breeze. Rocket weather.
As usual, I'd over packed. I spent part of Friday going through my list of "Saturday possibles" and prepping those that made the cut. My daughter was in town, so I got off to a later start then expected, but by the time I arrived only three flights had happened due to issues with the launch system. I waited around for my presence to change the flow of luck, then went to my car to grab the first victim once enough of me had rubbed off.
Or so I was told.
Very little thought went into picking the first flight of the day. I last flew my Big Daddy on Labor Day weekend of 2001. Nine days later our whole world changed. That day the Big Daddy would be my very first lawn dart, almost skewering a Mazda on its straight up, straight down flight. (The Mazda owner was bummed. He thought having his car used as a landing pad sounded awesome.) The Daddy survived the impact better than most rockets would have, but my enthusiasm for it waned and it got shuttled to a dark, dusty place in two basements.
Anyway, as you can see, very little work went into fixing the scars from the rather violent meeting with the early September lawn at Miami Meadows. I almost threw it out a couple of times over the years, and at one point used it as a painting base for the nose cone of my Der Grosser Vati, likely the only reason I kept it around. Lately I began to think it might be worth repairing, then decided to instead just clean off the dust and see how it performed.
And perform it did. D12-5 flight, just like the bad old days. It left the pad and arced right, unlike almost every other flight on the day that went left. Topped out over 500', at which time the ejection charge fired and it recovered just as advertised. I must admit that I wasn't entirely sure it would be this way. I've been hearing a lot of chatter involving other Dads that were involved in a rocket meets earth situation just like mine, but I'm a believer. Might be time to consider splicing in a new length of tube.
Flight 2 would be my Estes Raven. I have a review almost finished for this rocket, but didn't have much in the way of flight pics, so it got the nod today. It would be a C6-5 flight, or so I thought. This was another rocket that I'd prepped for flight at both B6-4 Field and eRockets Field in the not too distant past. I really need to be more thorough on my preflight checks.
As soon as the button was pushed on this one I realized that I had made a mistake. Instead of leaving the pad with a bone in its nose, the Raven left with something approaching lethargy. It seemed to be laboring on the C6-5 and the motor cut out long before it was expected to power down. Something was amiss, and I thought back to the prep work I'd done for a scrubbed B6-4 Field launch.
I caught most of the flight on my phone without moving it, which should tell you how slow the Raven was moving. The C6-5 flight was showing all the signs of a B6 flight. Extreme facepalm. At least I got the liftoff shots I needed for the review.
The flight ended perfectly with the Raven drifting in on a heavily reefed old Estes chute that I dug out of another rocket during my prep session. The old chute performed flawlessly, but I would have issues with a vintage chute several flights in the future.
After retrieving the Raven, I noted that Randy had a table full of motors for sale under his tent, and I found and purchased the last pack of D12-7s that he had. This would allow for flight #3 of the Estes Mega Mini Max, a saga that was on its last legs, but that I wanted to see through to the end.
If you've not followed the saga to this point, the picture should tell you a lot about the story so far. The Mega Mini Max is a standard Estes Mini Max with just a motor block, a heavily weighted nose cone and minimal recovery system. It's set up for 24mm flight and the only reason that I keep attempting to fly it is because I like the hot pink paint. Flight #3 also equals body tube #3, and the nose cone and fins are all that are left of the original 2015 bird.
Leaving the pad has never been an issue with this bird. It seems that everything that comes after the liftoff has been the problem. Flight #1 detonated at the 150' level on a C11-7. Flight #2 was on a D12-5 and the ejection ripped the body tube down to the engine block. Flight #3 would be the charm. Uh, well it might be if I hadn't lost it on the way down. It had windcocked left off the pad, climbed out to the expected altitude, then disappeared seconds after the ejection charge fired. It had six feet of hit pink streamer and the whole flightline lost it when I did. I kept scanning the skies to the north, sure that I'd eventually catch sight of the big streamer, but no sighting ever happened. I walked the field near the entrance. Still nothing. Looked like the Mega Mini Max experiment was over.
For my fourth flight I decided to go with another bird that hasn't seen the skies since the Miami Meadows QUARK launch back in 2001, the Estes Super Vega. This was one of the kits that my wife bought for me when we found a hobby shop going out of business in Arlington, Texas in 1994. I got it started soon after Christmas, but couldn't find time to finish it with two toddlers demanding the bulk of my time and attention, so it migrated to the basement. By the time I decided to have another go at it in 2001, I decided to not leave well enough alone and built it as a 3x18mm cluster. I borrowed a clip whip, got the motors secured, and couldn't get it down the launch rod. For some reason I built it with a 1/8" engine mount, and after two paint jobs, it's a tight fit. Reluctantly I pull it down and instead decide to fly the Estes Cobra variant that I picked up several years ago in an eBay auction. I call it the Cobra Kai because I amuse me. It needed some work to actually get flightworthy, but it's been in flying shape for a couple of years, and has even been with me to most of the late 2019 and early 2020 launches. I really thought I got an on-pad glamour shot, but apparently my phone is A LIAR. The pics describe the flight better than I can.
Several years ago, I had an Estes SWAT cluster that left the pad with only two of the three motors lit. It flew perfectly fine, nary a wiggle. The Cobra Kai didn't so much as wiggle as flail. Impressive feat of skywriting, but no message could be discerned. Ejection charge fired when it was about six feet off the ground and the impact was pretty hard. It will need lots of work to get it back in the air, but I'm already thinking of this in terms of the Mini Mega Max. I'll get it flying eventually.
Fifth flight of the day would be the Estes Photon Probe, freshly painted and decaled and looking slicker than nocturnal raptor feces.
Looking for something? Like maybe a launch pic? Don't bother looking here. The two rockets shown in this pic left the pads together with my phone in the prone position. DOH! Operator error, which on a day like this is far from a surprise with all the pad difficulties. Still, it was the third time in the last five launches that it happened to one of my rockets. I got to see some of the flight, but only the tiniest bit. It windcocked left, went to a respectable height on the C6-5, and ejected at apogee. I'd used a vintage chute that I'd recently repaired and the shock of ejection must have been more than it could handle as the Photon Probe fell to earth with the shroud lines trailing and the chute nowhere to be seen. Tough bird that it is, the Probe recovered without damage. Next flight - nylon. One good thing that came about as a result of a flight was the flash of hot pink I saw across the gravel parking lot. Turns out the Mega Mini Max had found its way home after all, and all in one piece.
Next rabbit out of my hat would be another cluster, the Estes Firehawk that I hadn't flown since 2005. The original kit was 18mm powered, but around the time I built it I was seeing any BT-60 kit as a potential cluster victim. The amount of dust that I had to clean off of it was pretty stunning, as was how good it looked once it was clean.
Somewhere there is a video of the flight, but danged if I can figure out what happened to it. It's not in the photo recycling bin on the phone and I can't find it on the computer. Pity. It did the cluster thing nicely. Lots of smoke and flame with all three engines burning. It windcocked left like most of the rest of the flights on the day, but at ejection the fifteen year old Kevlar snapped like sewing thread. The nose cone and nylon parachute took off for parts unknown while the body did a freefall. It hit hard and broke off two of the fins. Repairable, but I'll need to pick up a balsa cone and go with the ol' Estes tri-fold shock cord mount.
For my next trick, I pulled the Jet Freak out of my hat. (Cue Rocket Squirrel "That trick never works.") As I make my way to the flightline, I hear "Uh-oh, he's got a glider," which is pretty much the same thing.
Actually, Rocket J. may not have been too far off. I've built and flown a decent amount of Jet Freak gliders in the past couple of years. They're a simple build and can often be put together in an evening with a raid of the scrap pile and a nose cone. The one thing I've learned is that they don't react well to paint. Dope or markers are definitely the way to go with these. This one was painted fairly lightly, but I've not found that to make much of a difference. I was prepared for fluttering, which is what I got.
Things looked great at lift-off. I made my first flight of a Jet Freak with an A8-3, so I was prepared for the altitude. No one else was. What I wasn't prepared for was what happened at apogee. Even 300' in the air, the ejection charge sounded like someone had sidled up to the bar and said "Make it a double." Instead of the halting glide I'd come to expect, the thing just fluttered through the sky like a fall leaf. Much hilarity ensued. Many commented on my lack of trimming, but my experience had shown the Jet Freak to be extremely forgiving and usually good even by the most ham-handed of builders. As we watched it flutter back toward the field I was thinking that it had blown the nose cone. It landed deep behind the mid-power pads and another flyer picked it up and brought it to me. Not only was the nose cone missing, the entire engine mount and boom were gone, leaving behind a clean stripe of bare balsa where they once resided. The bad news is that I have to buy another nose cone and find another scrap piece of BT-20. The good news is that all I have to do is glue it in place on the empty spot.
Next to fly would be the FSI Viking III, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. This was a project that had come about due to a late night screw up. It had been meant to be a minimum diameter 24mm powered clone, but the Kevlar got tangled, and instead of screwing the whole project up trying to right the error, I turned it into an 18mm small field bird.
The Viking left the pad and arced to the left, but not nearly as bad as many of the flights on the day had. At ejection it raced back across the field, winding up in the gravel parking lot and being dragged through the old blacktop by the strong breeze, earning a few new scratches, but no other damage.
Next to last on the day would be the BT-80 upscale of the Estes Goonybird Missile Toe. My first Goony upscale had been a modified Estes Fat Boy, and as such, built with 18mm power. This turned out to be a little lacking in power, so I built the next one, the Missile Toe, as a 24mm D powered bird. This was a big improvement in the power category. Between the added power and the oddball fin setup, the flight characteristics of the Toe would likely be described as "spirited".
No surprises here. Todays flight was just like the previous ones, leaving the pad in a hurry, windcocking left and jinking all the way to apogee. At ejection the Toe raced back across the field to the gravel just like the Viking III had, but the landing was quite a bit more violent. Apparently a fin was splintered at impact and additional damage caused by the subsequent dragging across the gravel. It will fly again. It just won't look quite as good.
It wasn't planned that way, but the last flight of the day would be a recently built clone of the Estes Astron Skyhook. I'd previously built two Skyhooks before this one, and to say I've got a checkered past with them is understating it a bit. Before today I was two for two. Built two, lost two. After today I'm three for three.
The flight would be on a B6-6. I knew this would be a high flight, but it's such a big field that I thought I stood a decent chance of getting it back. Recovery would be handled by six feet of hot pink streamer.
The flight itself was unremarkable. Instead of windcocking violently to the left, it was more of a gentle curve to the left. I was able to watch it the whole way and I began counting after it began the coast phase. I got to six and saw nothing. Then I continued to see nothing. I scanned the skies for the flash of hot pink from the streamer, but still saw nothing. I walked the whole left side of the field and finally found something, but it was nothing. Nothing was what I'd continued to find for the rest of the afternoon. At this point I was out of things to fly, bummed about losing another Skyhook, and burnt out to the point of being glare-blind, so I called it a day.
I should mention the other two of my three non-flights. Aside from the aforementioned Super Vega, I also made attempts with the Estes Sequoia,
which sat on the pad through several cycles over this launch and the previous launch, and the Semroc Point.
I'll try the Sequoia sometime later. I think it was just a bad ignitor. The Point might be too big of a pain to actually fly. I bought some cheap gator clips to extend the reach of the pad clips, but the wires to the cheap clips melted. At least we know the pad was getting power that time.
