WSR beanfield launch, Cedarville, Ohio - 12/12/21

 To be honest, I wasn't 100% sure this launch was going to come off, and once it looked like it was going forward, I wasn't sure I was going to make it.  It takes the better part of an hour and a half to go from Fort Thomas, KY to Cedarville, OH, and I wasn't sure I had it in me.

Oh, who am I kidding.  Yeah, I was dragging a bit.  Yeah, I got off to a slow start and didn't hit the road until after 11.  No, I never seriously considered not going, even after having gotten my December flight checkmark the previous Saturday.  I had vacation time wedged in there and used a bit of it to finish a few projects I had going.  As usual, I had a box of rocket mixed between never flown and not flown in a long time.  First on the pad would be one of the long-timers, an Estes Sprint upscale that I built before they came out with their own Sprint XL.

This rocket was built in 2012 and last flew back in the spring of 2013 in what was planned to be the later paint scheme.  It was damaged on that flight and the Estes kit showed up that year and was the giveaway kit at NARAM, but I had a change of heart about the paint scheme.  That finally happened this past spring when I repaired and repainted my scratch build in Astron Sprint livery.  I even managed to use the Estes Powered eyeball decal.  

The Sprint XXL spent a lot of time on the pad for having only one flight.  There was one burnt igniter and one change of clips before it finally got launched.  The flight was an eye-opener, the kind of bird that really shows what an E12-6 flight could be like.  The Astron Sprint is known to be a high flying design, and experience tells me that the upscale is as well.  This flight seemed like it would never reach apogee, a burn that went on long past the point that you expected burnout.  The flight crossed the creek to our right and wound up deep in the beanfield.  I was feeling really good about my chance of a close recovery at this point, then came the ejection.  At first it looked to be recovering as I expected it would, then it stopped descending.  There was no chance of it being a thermal.  Temps were in the upper 30's at the time of the flight,  I was wearing gloves.  And a serious hat.  It was freaking cold.  Apparently the Sprint didn't read the forecast.  Once again, I felt like Fred Flintstone in the monster costume, "watching and waving, watching and waving".  My Astron Stinger was obviously lost earlier the previous week, but I thought I might stand a chance of recovering the big Sprint just based on the amount of space we were dealing with.  It cleared the driveway that led to the farmhouse, but by what appeared to be by only about 20 feet or so.  The combination of the mud and the fact that I had a ready-made parking space made the idea of walking after it idiotic.  

I drove up and down the driveway twice once I reached the house.  Saw nothing.  Then on my second pass the parachute caught my eye when a breeze blew it up.  It was WAY more than 20 feet in.  More like 200 feet, and the mud was very obviously bad.  I had my mud boots on, so I started in.  After several minutes of head-down slogging I looked up, expecting to be within a few feet, only to find that a) I was still 100 feet away, and b) slogging through mud is a killer workout.  My boots seemed to weigh 40 pounds each.  I felt like I was slogging uphill through the mud.  Stopping for even a moment began a definite trend toward middle earth, which only served to clot the mud higher up on my pants.  As my heart threatened mutiny, I kept the slog going forward.  Eventually I arrived, not quite at the rocket, but within a long stretch of a fin.  At least I knew to hold the body away from myself when I pulled the shock cord to unstick it from the mud.  I took the dry route back.  No.  There was nothing that resembled a dry route.  Back at the car I nearly broke a hip swinging my feet to loosen the mud.  Was I having fun yet?  Apparently I was.

Once I was done unclotting my boots, I picked the newly painted FRW Long Distance Voyager as mt second flight.  This is a BT70 upscale with 2xD12-5 power, so I was hoping that I'd be able to avoid another deep trip into the mud on recovery.  Turned out to be an excellent choice, but not for the reason that I initially expected it to be.

 

From the moment it cleared the launch rod it was obvious that something was wrong.  The Voyager was struggling to gain altitude, taking "slow, realistic take off" to a whole new level.  The flight was dead straight to 300' or so.  I had expected windcocking due to the big fin surfaces and had set the rod straight to cut down on the distance that it crossed the creek.  It never approached the creek.

This was far and away my straightest flight on the day, and as a result, the recovery drift was fairly deep into the beans.  When I reached the landing zone I found just what everyone had expected.  Only one of the D12-5 motors had lit.  All in all, it was a respectable flight for one D12.  

Since I had a ready to go D12-5, I picked the TLP Bolo to be my third flight of the day.  This one last flew in 2013 at NARAM, but when I was building it, I had grabbed the wrong nose cone.  I finally got around to repainting the correct nose cone back in the summer and it looks just like the face card again.

I guess it might have been a good idea to change out the igniter before I tried to reuse the motor because it sat through a round on the pad.  When I went out to switch to a new igniter, the launch lug pulled off as I slid it up the rod.  Looks like the second flight of the Bolo will have to wait for the next go-round in the beans on 1-1-22.

I subbed in a first flight rocket, the Semroc Hydra One, still in primer but recently finished and itching to get some airtime.  I spent several years on this build, my fault entirely because I tried to build it without the instructions.  At night on lunch break at my desk.  I got some of the fins glued on in the wrong places and had to peel them off, trying to salvage them as best as I could.  Did I mention that eRockets sells the fin set separately?

This was not quite ready for my previous launch at B6-4 Field where it would have flown on a B6-4.  Here the flight would be on a C6-5 with a bit less angle on the rod.  Despite this, the flight left the pad heading right at a fairly aggressive angle, pretty much the same as the Sprint XXL.  It topped out around the 600-700' point, popped the chute just as it tipped, and began heading back to the good side of the creek.  Two of the shroud lines ripped and the chute collapsed in on itself, so the recovery wasn't terribly deep in the beans, landing two steps in the mud just off the grass.  Since the rocket was still in primer, nature provided me with some extra fill & finish to sand off along the whole length of the rocket.  I wish I could say I was looking forward to painting this bird.

 I'll be honest.  The long recovery slog on flight #1 had taken a lot of the spring out of my step, so I made the decision to fly smaller birds the rest of the day.  I still had two first flight birds that I wanted to try, the Semroc Laser X being one of them.  This is an oldie, and was actually a low numbered kit that I picked up from Carl the minute he posted that it was available.  Construction was started soon after it arrived, but then stopped when my wife started making moving noises.  Parts got scattered in the move, and were only recently gathered together again.

I REALLY didn't want another slog through the mud, so this would be a B6-4 flight.  The flight followed the traditional route, over the creek with the wind to about 400-450', then a full chute drift downrange into one of the areas on the field with the most standing water.  I was walking that way with a teenage girl who was recovering an Alpha III and told her that her best bet would be to approach from behind the large puddle/small pond, but she headed off into the muck at a direct angle toward her Alpha.  Fifteen feet in she stopped to decide on a different route and sunk calf deep in the mud.  I waded out to get her unstuck and we both approached from behind the puddle.  As I walked down I noticed that the Laser X chute was still actively catching the breeze with every gust and bashing the upper section into the mud.  I had recently sanded, primed, fill & finished, sanded and primed it all at home, expecting to paint when I got home, but all the mud bashing has given it another coat of natural fill & finish to sand off.  Glad to finally get this one some flight time.

By the time I returned from the Laser X flight it was approaching 4:00pm, which meant that my next flight would likely be my last on the day.  I began prepping the Rocketarium Trident T117-13, a rare first flight bird in that it was completely painted.  I'd started construction on this and the Semroc Jupiter B last year around this time when I got stuck at our remote location for work and needed something to pass the long hours between actual things to do.  It turned out looking cool and I'm now trying to decide if I need to make the next purchase the 18 or 24mm version. 

I borrowed a clip whip from WSR prez Dave "Love Shack" Combs and hooked the three A3-4T motors up.  At liftoff it was obvious that something was off, which was confirmed at ejection when we heard two distinct ejection charges instead of three.  As with the earlier 2xD12-5 flight of the Voyager, I'd missed on one of the cluster motors.  Altitude was still respectable at 600' but the bonus on the flight was the landing; one step off the grass in the mud.  My legs would live to recover another day.

Muddy, but victorious, I stuck around to help strike the range and load everything out.  Normally a Sunday launch would have me rushing to get home because of work in the morning, but this launch had fallen during our December Christmas shopping vacation, so I was able to head home at my leisure, listening to the Bengals do everything in their power to gag a winnable game against the 49er's.  Some things just never change.