Sunday, August 24 was a day made for rocketry. Temps were in the low to mid 80's, winds just strong enough to be considered breezy, and plenty of clouds to break up the monotony of full sun. This made up for the drive to the field, which from my house in NKY took a bit over an hour. If you've never experienced I-75, count your blessings. If you have, I'm preaching to the choir.
I arrived at the field and found prep well underway. I actually helped more with setting up EZ Ups than with the range equipment. As things came to life, more and more cars arrived, resulting in a pretty lively turnout between ARC teams and spectators, but no cars were damaged in the making of this blog. That said, I make no promises.
The first rocket on the pad for me was the last one I packed, the Centuri Thunder Roc. This rocket doesn't fit well in my compact hatchback, so whenever it makes the trip out to fly, it's always a challenge to find a place for it in the car. On this day it was draped across the back of the car from the package shelf to the passenger headrest. Pretty good chance that I'll never build a Mean Machine.
The D12-5 flight made for the perfect opener on the day. It was a largely straight flight with just the slightest lean to the right, topping out at 884'. The windcocking on the day would eventually become more pronounced, but on this flight, it was negligible at best. It ejected after tipping over, popped a perfect chute and landed gently upfield of the flightline. Despite the hard hit directly on the fins it managed to not break the traditional Thunder-series fin. I think this may be a first for me.
The next flight reeks of disappointment. I bought the Semroc Aerobee 300 back when Carl was still alive and due to some unforeseen issues, (hangar rash, lost pieces,) I only recently managed to get it flyable. It was third in line on the pad behind two Quest Astras, so I was conserving power on my phone, waiting for the LCO to call the flight before I got ready to film anything. The LCO called the flight for the first Astra and the whole flightline was shocked, confused and saddened to see my Aerobee 300 leave the pad. The D12-5 was perfectly nominal, windcocking slightly to the left to 1069'. Ejection occurred as it tipped, and it recovered parawad due to a broken shroud line. Impact was fairly harsh, but the Aerobee survived without damage. There would be a later brain fart launch of an ARC entry, so I wouldn't suffer alone. The results were nowhere near as impressive as the unexpected launch of my TLP Perseus, which I'm sure I posted about in an earlier blog entry. Maximum destruction with that one, and the pic remains one of my favorites, even with me in it.
Sticking with the D12-5 trend, I chose the Estes GeoSat LV for flight #3. This is a battered eBay refugee that I've been slowly working on for a while. I had always been disappointed in the performance with the 18mm engine, so when I began working on it and noticed that the glue on the engine mount was failing, I decided to pull it and replace the mount and recovery system with a 24mm mount and Kevlar shock cord. The difference in performance is well worth the trouble.
There's quite a bit of surface area between the fins and pods on the GeoSat, so I naturally expected a fair amount of windcocking on this flight. I got nothing. In fact, it actually flew slightly to the right with the wind. It topped out at 921' and ejected at apogee. The 12" chute made for a surprisingly slow recovery, fairly deep downfield to the right of the pads. It initially stuck the landing but had blown over by the time I reached the landing site.
Flight #4 would be something different, a D12-5. Okay, so I loaded up on D12s before this launch, but it would be different in that it was a Custom Venture on this particular D12, essentially making this a minimum diameter rocket. I flew this combination here five years ago, so this isn't unprecedented. However, this would be the first flight with the decal in place as it turned up in my shop last week. Woo. Party.
As expected, the Venture ripped off the pad. I had the rod angled slightly into the breeze, hoping to let it ride back on the streamer. It roared into one of the lower clouds as it was approaching apogee, so we lost sight of it, but it topped out at 1321'. As was the case with my E-powered US Rockets Supersonic a few years back, we never caught sight of it after it entered the clouds. It wasn't until it was a mere 100' off the ground that it was spotted, 100 yards away, straight out in front of us and streaming its way into the soccer parking lot. The gravel landing was pretty harsh, but the Venture survived with only slight paint chips on one fin. Tough bird.
I flew several two-stage rockets on the day, the first being the Estes Rigel 3 that I faked using the nose cone from the Sci-Fi Assortment. It is flying in all white because I've yet to find a decal scan that I can work with. This would be a B6-0/B6-6 combination, but I could have sworn I'd loaded it C6-0/C6-7 during my basement prep session.
While not the flight I envisioned when I pulled it from the box, the B6-0/B6-6 combo moved things along quite well. It staged cleanly around 154' with the booster returning to the mid-power box behind the pads and the sustainer continuing on to the 837' apogee just to the left of the pads. The parachute, which had filled perfectly fine just minutes earlier, now acted like a surly pre-teen and refused to pop. Instead of a gentle recovery deep in the field, the parawad mess came in over the flightline and made a noisy entrance between two of the cars to the right of my own. Missed everything by some stroke of luck. Cracked a fin on the sustainer by another. It wouldn't be the last bit of damage for me on the day.
With a successful two-stage flight under my belt, I decided to tackle a cluster for my next flight. The Estes Starchaser Thunderstar hadn't flown in ten years, but had been loaded and carted to several launches in the time since. It had even been taken to B6-4 Field for a 2xA8-3 flight that never happened due to wind concerns. As it was, the Thunderstar was one of the better flyers of the X-Prize kits. In my case it had always been the cluster that had limited its flight time due to altitude concerns at B6-4 Field. Today I came fully prepared to get the ten-year flight absence off of my personal books.
I initially had an issue with continuity when I first hooked up the Thunderstar. I took it down and used my multi-tool to more securely twist the igniter leads together and was rewarded with the correct tone when I checked continuity a second time. The flight would be 2xC6-5, a perfect combo for conditions. Both engines lit and the Thunderstar left the pad without a hint of windcocking, a dead straight flight to 981'. Ejection occurred as it was still heading up with one motor being a C6-5 and the other a C5-5.5 as two distinct pops were heard. It recovered deep in the soccer complex, thankfully on the grass for a change.
Sticking with the multi-engine theme, flight #7 would be the Semroc Arcon-Hi, a multi stage bird that I recently finished after starting it in a hurricane last September. This was an actual Semroc kit, one of the few that are still available through eRockets. I've taken to scrounging parts to approximate some of the kits that went OOP before I was able to order them.
The Arcon-Hi would fly on a B6-0/B6-6 combo, same as the Rigel 3. I expected more altitude out of the sleeker Arcon-Hi and got it. Staging occurred at 211', an almost imperceptibly smooth event, and the sustainer continues to 919'. The old style Semroc chute went parawad, but held the rocket aloft for the longest recovery of the day. (I think there may have been some thermal action due to spending most of the recovery over asphalt.) Landing occurred on the gravel, but other than the usual scrapes there was no noticeable damage.
Flight #8 would be another old Semroc bird that dates back to the Carl days, the Scrambler. Seems to me I got this as a Christmas present and started building it immediately. Paint issues got it shoved to the back of the queue, but it was one of the unfinished rockets that I dragged out back in the spring. I'm happy to report that it's now finished. Now onto the Excalibur.
Clusters, being the finicky creatures that they are by nature, have bedeviled me of late. I had trouble with the connection on the Estes Thunderstar earlier, and previous to that I had a fatal issue with the Rocketarium - VK-7 Sounding Rocket last September. I took extra care with the clip whip on the Scrambler and was pretty pumped when I got the continuity signal. When the time came for launch, it was immediately apparent that the signal was lying. The flight was supposed to be 3xB6-4, but only two lit. It still cleared the rod at a decent clip, and the flight was never in trouble, but the altitude suffered, reaching only 382'. The flight leaned away from the pad toward the soccer field and was pointing down when the ejection charge fired. The soft grass recovery on the soccer field was a bonus, and I'll have to try it again the next time out, this time as a 3xC6-5 flight.
I was out of clusters by this time, (not really as I had the Semroc Egg Crate loaded and ready to go,) but I still had D12 birds to fly. The Estes Maxi Streak came about out of a Baby Bertha kit and the parts stash one night when I was itching to build something while I watched a ball game. It was built just before the NARAM in 2011 and looked great when I loaded the car that morning. By the time my range shift was over and I was able to get a few flights in, the heat from sitting in my car had burned a negative image of the decal into the fluorescent orange paint and the decal had peeled away. It's still vaguely visible but happily fading fourteen years later.
Had it not been for the Venture, the Maxi Streak would have been the highest flight for me on the day. Still, it was an impressive flight, a dead straight stovepipe type of flight that topped out at 1274'. Despite the impressive altitude, it still managed to stay on the field, recovering out near the fence but just right of the pads. I'd pay for that kind of easy recovery.
Next up was the Centuri Magnum Hornet that I cloned back in 2003 after realizing that it was a Centuri bird built using Estes parts. The first time out it performed as expected, but still received an Estes dent at the top of the body tube from the nose cone rebounding. That bummed me out, but after today there is no trace of that damage. (I'm trying to distill something positive from this flight.)
From the start, the D12-5 flight looked perfect. It leaned left off of the rod and headed back toward the soccer fields, but not aggressively so. It ejected as it was still heading up and something was immediately wrong. The body and nose cone had obviously separated, and the body tube began coming in ballistic. This would have only been a minor annoyance, but the area where the ballistic tube was heading was near the Porta-Poopys out near the football end zone, which was also where Prez Dave was walking back after recovering his Estes Sasha. The body hit behind him, loud enough that he stopped and turned around. The bright yellow must have been hard to miss and he did me the favor of bringing it back with him, saving me the walk of shame. The top of the rocket now has a soccer dent. Or a gravel dent. Whatever the case, the 2003 gash is no longer noticeable. When I first looked at it I thought the damage was terminal, but I think with some judicious trimming I might be able to salvage it. Just shorter. Maybe not Magnum-worthy anymore.
Being an Estes D.O.M. fan, I have a large backlog of plans I printed off years ago that I plan to eventually build. The Estes D.O.M. Tiger Shark is the most recent one to be picked from the pile. I've always had an unhealthy fascination with anything that glides on recovery, so a gliding booster was just something I had to try out for myself.
Because this was an entirely new thing, I ran into a little bit of a problem on this flight. I knew from experience that the A8-0/A8-5 combo would make for a quick boost and separation, so I told myself to be sure to watch for the booster to see if it did anything that resembled gliding. I kept the camera pointed at the launch pad through the boost. And kept it there while I watched the separation and what could be considered the glide of the booster. It never occurred to me to follow the rocket past boost with the camera, so there's a lot of footage of the smoke clearing. We all have our "DOH" moments. Some more than others. What all of this means is that while I was watching the booster, I had no idea what happened to the sustainer. None at all. Everyone else was also watching the booster to see if there was any semblance of a glide. The sustainer was just gone.
Yeah, back to the Tiger Streak sustainer. I kind of knew which way it had been heading when it separated, and with streamer recovery and a left leaning boost, I figured it had to have landed somewhere between the entrance of the complex to the east end zone of the football field. I started walking the field, looking for anything white that may have been the rocket. It's my golf ball scan. I have a short attention span and can never remember where my shots landed. I hate golf as much as it hates me. As I was completing my search I came across the Porta-Poo's. Carter had launched his Estes Wacky Wiggler and was on his way out to retrieve it, using his golf ball scan. As I approached the trash barrel next to the Porta-Poo's, I noticed something odd draped over the side of the barrel. A couple of steps later I realized what I was looking at and started howling with laughter. Carter was mere feet away and realized what had me in the state I was in. His Wacky Wiggler looked like it was wiggling itself in or out of the trash barrel. It had disassembled somewhere along the recovery path and parts were spread around the general area of the fragrant Poo's. Carter complained because he'd forgotten his camera, so I volunteered my services, waving my nominal fee. It was a once in a lifetime landing. Well, half of a landing.
I eventually had to give up on finding the sustainer for the Tiger Shark, and with what little energy I had left, decided on the MPC Delta Katt that I cloned as my final flight on the day. I cloned this last winter in the midst of a bout with MPC fever. Ungainly as it looks, I found out on a frozen January day that it works pretty flawlessly, even with a ham-handed builder like myself. This would be the first flight on a field bigger than B6-4 Field, so I went with a big motor, an Estes 1/2A3-2T.
In theory, this was a second shake-down flight because the 1/4A flight last winter was too brief to really tell much about the flight other than that it was a viable glider. It was literally 15-feet off the rod when the ejection charge fired, and I felt lucky to capture what little of the flight I did. The 1/2A was a more suitable motor for this rocket as it took it a bit higher before the glider released. I was clearly able to see the struggles that the glider went through in trying to find the way to a stable glide. Through nothing more than dumb luck, I had managed to come up with a viable glider. At separation it wiggled a bit, then haltingly began to find its wings, coming down in a circular path and landing just behind the pads. (WARNING: THINKING AHEAD!) I'm of the opinion that a coat of paint might help, but in the past I've ruined gliders with a coat of paint. This kit recommends that in the instructions, and the ease of construction has me thinking it might be worth it to take a chance. This might be one of those gliders like my Condor, which flew fine when painted. I'd initially begun adding color with markers, just to make it more visible in the air. The flight pics show that was a good idea. I think it will be back at the pads in a few weeks painted and decaled.
After the Delta Katt, my day was done. The heat wasn't overpowering, but any kind of heat hits differently as I age. Luckily, I was well stocked with drinks, and I hung around to help tear down the range. While I was working on the tear down, one of my fellow WRS members returned from his recovery with a small white rocket. It was the sustainer from the Tiger Shark. I wouldn't go home without damage to repair, but I also wouldn't leave anything on the field. WINNING!
