.666

I didn't expect to be doing this again so close on the heels of the last blog entry, but the Saturday after Memorial Day turned out to be about perfect for rocketry, so no way I felt like I could skip out on a chance to fly with the Wright Stuff Rocketeers.  I started my day buying parachutes, because I forgot mine, and C5-3 motors, because I apparently didn't have anymore.  Luckily, Lee Berry of Merlin Missile Solutions was on field as our vendor.  A nice crowd was on hand, with ten to fifteen cars behind the flightline all day.  They got to see one of my all-time worst rocket days.  Lucky them.

I had some great flights on the day, starting off with the return of my FSI Hercules clone on an E12-6.  The Herc had been off the rod for a while for a repaint.  11 years being the while.  I got myself into a camo paint job that I didn't really have the patience for.  A few weeks ago, I gritted my teeth and finished it.

I know.  I know.  It doesn't look like there's a rocket in this picture, so effective is my camo job.  No matter.  It's a relief to have it back on the pad.  This was a perfect choice for my first flight of the day.  We were facing the parking area for the soccer games happening next to us.  The Hercules took off heading slightly to the left and directly away from us over the soccer parking area.  Altitude was excellent, 1000' or so.  It had slowed, but was still moving forward when the ejection charge fired.  The rocket began coming back our way, slightly left of the pads.  It landed with a bounce just to our left.

Back in 2022, I found a design contest winner in an old Model Rocket Magazine scan that looked interesting.  I was shocked at how small the Moonraker was, and pretty much decided on an upscale as soon as I saw the dry fit of the parts.  That's how I wound up with the SLS Moonraker.

I'm not entirely happy with the results.  Those fins are going to be tough to keep in flying shape.  I borrowed the paint scheme from my brother-in-laws Kiss Army Cyclotron.  This would be a D12-5 flight.  I thoughe I'd loaded it with the motor at home, but it turned out I hadn't, so I borrowed the motor from the National Aerospace Plane.  The flight followed a similar flight path to the Hercules, arcing over the soccer fields and slightly to the left off the pad.  The flight topped out around 800', ejected as it was sideways, then began drifting quickly back across the field toward the flightline.  It landed in the no-mans-land between the two ballfields and was recovered without damage.

Flight #3 would be where my batting average began to suffer.  The Zorch was one of my "what's on my shop floor?" SPEV-type projects, and had been sitting on the shelf in the basement since NARAM in 2011.  I had collected the parts and put them together before realizing that I had in fact built a slightly upscaled FSI Sprint.  Not to be deterred, I named my creation The Zorch after one of my Grandpa's favorite expressions.  The Zorch was apparently a catch all mystery location on the human body, and was usually heard of as "That got him right in The Zorch."  I grew up thinking it was an anitomical term.

I had this rocket loaded with an E12-6 for a long time as I had planned to fly it in the cornfield.  Looking at it now, I should have waited for corn season.  After the first two flights on the day arced out over the soccer parking area, The Zorch, flying from the same rod, instead went almost dead straight when it left the pad.  I knew it was in trouble as soon as I saw the flight path.  It might have been okay with a streamer, but as we'll see later, that might not even have saved it.  As it was, the ejection charge fired while it was still heading up.  The chute filled immediately and it began floating back our way.  It crossed the flightline and at times looked to be caught in a thermal.  It eventually crossed the road, still several hundred feet in the air.  We watched as it drifted WAY back in the trees, looking like it might actually make it to the Great Miami River.  I declined to look for it.

 

I wanted flight #4 to stay on the field, so I chose the Centuri UFO Invader on a C5-3.  The Invader actually started life as a Centuri SSV Scorpion that I won on eBay as the only bidder.  It was in rough shape, as in stomped on.  I shored the near dead bird up as well as I could and gave it a final chance at flight glory.  Since the whole thing had been built with white glue, it came apart easily, and I used the nose cone and tube connecter as the start of the UFO Invader.  I flew it once, then failed to get the paint job right for several years.  I recently got it to a point that I felt it looked decent enough to start applying the decals.

First off, the LCO was impressed because he'd never heard of a C5-3.  Personally, I was expecting more out of the C5-3, so what followed was pretty disappointing.  The UFO Invader left the rod with a lot less punch than I'd been expecting.  The flight began to sag to the left almost immediately upon leaving the rod.  It clawed its way to a respectable small field altitude and was heading down when the ejection charge fired.  It was high enough to be able to drift back to the area just behind the hi-power pads, but that wasn't saying a lot.  This pig really needed to be built as a 24mm bird.  I considered it, but that would have meant leaving off the vanes on the aft end of the body tube, something I think of as a Centuri trademark.  I opted against it.  For the sake of a real Super Kit flight, I should have.

Next up would be the Estes QCC Explorer, one of the most exasperating and at the same time, enjoyable rockets I've ever built.  The build took several years because I'd get ambitious, finish a ramjet, then start another one and have it go completely sideway.  I finally got the bug again when marooned at out satellite office and finished the whole thing this spring.  Last week I had it all painted and started the decals, only to find that I had a set that had half of the ramjet decals incorrectly printed.  So, mine is half finished.

The flight turned out to be perfect even without all the decals present.  It followed the flight path of the day, a gentle arc to the left out over the soccer parking area, to about 1000'.  Recovery occurred on the other side of the containers to our right.  All in all, a good tour of the launch facilities.

Things had been going so well for the Estes Python project.  Until masking.  I did the white paint, then the red, and masked it off after it had cured for the better part of a week.  Then I sprayed the final coat of white.  When I removed the mask from the red, the paint pulled away in several places.  Next time I'm using markers.  Or crayons.

While the paint didn't work out for me, the flight was perfect, following the same path as most of the other successful flights on the day, a slight left lean out over the soccer fields.  It topped out around 1000' and ejected just before forward motion stopped, then began riding the breeze back toward the flightline.  It actually cleared the flightline, and landed in an open area near what might have been a concession stand at one time.  Before I could get to it, an SUV backed up and turned around.  I first thought it had been in the same area as the Python, but it was right next to it.  Crisis averted.

My next flight, #7 on the day, was one that I'd waited a long time for, the Peter Alway Scale Bash Blossom V-2.  Back around 2003, I was left unsupervised for an evening.  While driving around, I saw a hobby shop that I hadn't seen since my college days when they were located near a Godfather's Pizza where I occasionally worked.  My brother and I would make payday trips out there to buy old Johan plastic model cars.  They'd moved several times since then, and I'd lost track of them after the first move.  I went in to soak up the pre-adulthood vibes, and the first thing to catch my eye was an Estes Maxi V-2 looking dusty and forgotten in the corner.  It went home with me, and thanks to my copy of Scale Bash, was soon well on the way to being a Blossom V-2 round.  Twenty years down the road it was going to make its first flight.

Looking at this pic now, I can see where my problems started.  I'd been using the 3/16" rod on pad A-4 all day with great success.  For this flight I'd negated to check the rod angle, and since my earlier flight, someone had adjusted it straight up instead of leaving it angled back toward the soccer fields.  This inattention to detail would prove costly.  The E12-6 flight left the pad heading straight up and slightly right, not angling out toward the soccer fields as I had grown accustomed.  I knew it was in trouble right away, but you likely know the feeling.  All I could do was watch.  The flight ended short of 1000' just as the rocket tipped.  It began drifting back across the flightline, falling quickly, but nowhere close to quickly enough.  It crossed Rip Rap Road and settled into the upper branches of a tree.  One of the spectators was excited to have tracked it and couldn't believe I wasn't going to go full arborist to get it back.  I told her that a man has to know his limitations.  Back to trolling old hobby shops, I guess.

After the sheet-soiling flight #7, I needed to see something successful.  The Nova SS upscale was exactly the right rocket at exactly the right time.  This was obviously an upscale of an FSI Nova and I painted it blue because one of my friends had a 1970 Nova with a 250 and a Cherry Bomb muffler.  It was dark blue, and the paint was the closest I found to the color of his car.  Many ill-considered things happened in that car.  I made it an SS just because I could find a name decal to work with.

The flight was an E12-6 flight, and I adjusted the rod, so it flew closer to the flight path of my earlier successful E12 flights, which were how I wanted my Blossom V-2 to fly.  The SS was quick off the pad, leaning slightly right with excellent altitude out over the soccer field.  Ejection occurred just before it lost forward motion, and the 15" chute that I purchased when I arrived at the field that morning brought it back safely back behind the storage containers.  Money.  Send a bag.

I had several rockets to choose from when it came time to fly my final flight of the day.  The Estes Solar Flare was my first choice, but I realized that I still had it loaded for a flight at B6-4 Field with an A8-0 instead of a C6-0.  I completely blanked on my home built Little Joe, a DIY project from 2001.  It was loaded and ready to go, but I forgot that it was in the front seat.  In the end, I chose a vintage FSI Nova that had been loaded with an E12-6 with an eye toward a cornfield flight.  You can see where this is headed, can't you?

Looked great on the pad.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember thinking that a C11 would be a better choice for this flight on this field, but I wasn't listening.  True to form, it left the pad fast, with a lean to the left and an arc out toward the soccer fields.  The streamer was a length of CAUTION tape several feet long.  I thought that would make it easy to see, but I thought the same thing a couple of years ago when I flew a USR Supersonic at this field.  We kept watching for the streamer that never streamed.  On this flight, the LCO and I did just that.  Watching.  Waiting.  Watching.  Waiting.  All for an event that never came.  It was several minutes before I realized it had been several minutes, and no way it was still hanging around up there.  At some point I turned into Mr. Maybe It Will Turn Up In Lost And Found.  It's never easy losing a rocket, but the toughest ones are the ones that just disappear.  They never write.  They never call.

If this had been a softball tournament, I'd have been happy wreaking havoc with a .666 batting average, but looking at it from the rocketry standpoint, it's ego crushing.  Someone at TRF once accused me of padding my lost rocket stats after I posted my list in a thread over there.  Would someone actually do that?  Is there an ultimate booby prize for one who feeds the most trees?