Since we last spoke, The Grove has replaced B6-4 Field as my flying field of choice. It happened out of necessity when I had a day off but found B6-4 Field full of day campers. I had actually stopped here a month earlier on a windy Sunday but found conditions too breezy for my liking. I'd flown at The Grove for a while back in the 2000's, but when a local high school repurposed it as a home baseball field and fenced it all in, I made B6-4 Field my semi-permanent residence. In the years since the school moved everything back to campus and The Grove spends a lot of time looking uncut and unloved. Best of all, the fence is gone. I accepted the invitation.
On this day I left work early to kill off some overtime hours, and I had flying on my mind as I made the drive home. As expected, the 95-degree heat was oppressive, and I made sure to pack a container of PowerAde and an iced tea. True to form, I found The Grove empty and overgrown. I set up in deep left-center and chose the Estes Super Alpha as my wind test bird.
I couldn't have picked a better first flight bird, and that's not a recent discovery. The Super Alpha is one of those rocket that doesn't get grabbed often, but when it does it turns in a flight that makes you wonder why it doesn't get flown more. This flight was on a B6-4 and was straight from beginning to end. I didn't have to move the camera anywhere but up. It topped out at 373', popped the chute as it stopped forward motion and rode gently to the ground. This is a great kit and should be on every hobby shop peg in the USA. Pity it's OOP.
My shirt was fully soaked with sweat by the time I chose my second bird, the Estes Rascal. I'd picked up the Rascal in a bottom dollar starter kit on eBay years ago. Construction had already started, but things being what they were at the time, it was hard to make out what kind of job had been done on it. That said, the all important decal was untouched. Turned out that everything else had been touched, and badly. The fins were included, having been cut out with a camping knife, also included, and without use of the template. None matched. They were all cut out freehand. The engine hook had been lost, but not to worry, a flimsy piece of wire had been substituted in its place. The starter set was a shop of horrors and hopefully the last time the builder made a turn down the rocket aisle in the hobby shop.
The Rascal flight was like the Super Alpha flight without the stellar recovery. It left the pad on a straight path but leaning slightly back over my head. When I looked up to track the flight I was looking astraight into the sun, and that's where the fun is. Or not. I couldn't see a thing and began looking wildly around for what should have been a filled chute at that point. I picked it back up just before impact. The chute had tangled in the shock cord and trailed the falling rocket harmlessly to a hard impact with the parking lot gravel to my left. The Rascal fins are pretty huge, and I expected at least one to be broken, but aside from a few paint chips, all was well.
Flight #3 would be my old buddy the Flight Dynamics Zepher 5, a random eBay purchase from 2007 or so. I thought it was just a unicorn, but I actually saw another one at the NARAM in 2013, so I know at least two were kitted. It's got that Baby Bertha-based Goony look to it.
This one went completely off the reservation and took a sharp left off the pad. Two things were to the left, the parking lot and the woods that bordered them. Actually, three things, the third being trouble. The flight topped out over the woods, ejecting as it tipped over at 417'. The nylon chute filled quickly, but it was about 20' deep in the woods at that point. The breeze was working in my favor, but it looked like I was going to lose it to the trees. I can't describe how close it came. If I found traces of green on the body tube it wouldn't have shocked me at all. As it was, it landed within ten feet of the tree line. I was living lucky.
The next flight would be full of questions. My Estes Interceptor is a clone that I bought piecemeal via eBay about 20 years back. It was during a time when the only parts available for the project were a BT-55 tube and engine mount, but I found a resin set of the cone, fin tips and tail piece on eBay one night. I had also previously found a set of decals from another vendor, so once the resin pieces arrived I was ready to go. It might have been Mike Schmidt (not mike Schmidt,) who sold the resin pieces, and not long after Moldin' Oldies appeared as a source for long OOP cones and parts. At any rate, I was thrilled with the final product.
There was a lot to unpack with this flight. When I first punched the button, nothing happened. Just as I was about to drop the camera and declare a misfire, it took off. Somehow, I managed to keep it in frame as it took off, but the flight kicked severely to the right and I was shocked to see it corkscrewing in the direction of Rt. 8. It also seemed to be burning a lot longer than usual. It tipped over and began looking like a lawn dart in the making before finally ejecting less than 100' from the ground. It landed about 15' off the roadway without damage. When I got to the landing site and pulled the expended engine casing, I was surprised to find that it was a C6-5, which explained the bonus delay somewhat. Apparently, I had loaded it for flight in Dayton, then punked out due to the heat before I got to fly it.
When I uncinched, I grabbed the Fun Rockets Wicked Winnie. This bird was a carrier for my first keychain camera many years back and still bears the scars. It was an impulse grab that day, as I found a pack of B6-4 motors just before I left the house. I also knew that the cheesy foam parts likely wouldn't be an issue with the humidity.
The Winnie flight didn't turn out to be what I'd hoped. It headed to the right off the pad and actually wound up over the field behind me. The flight topped out at 417' and was sideways when the ejection charge fired. I heard the charge, but it was muffled and indistinct. Sure enough, Winnie charged toward the ground with the two halves side by side, and the parachute still wedged in the top of the lower body tube. Impact was pretty brutal, as straight down recoveries usually are. My semi-educated guess, when I loaded the motor in the tube, I noticed that there was a bit of play and not a tight fit. It's possible that enough of the ejection gases escaped out the back that they didn't have enough oomph to launch the laundry. YMMV.
The 2/3 point of the launch would be the Estes Curvilinear, picked because it was recently repaired after being damaged in a shop fall and I had a mini motor on hand. The Curviliinear has been stellar at B6-4 Field on A10s and A3s, and I like the way it came out.
The Curvilinear would be the lowest level flight on the day, reaching 224', but saying that it was the prettiest flight wouldn't be entirely wrong. It headed out away from the pad and slightly to the right, ejected at apogee, and popped the chute. The only issue with the flight was a broken shroud line that brought it back with a noticeable limp. Bring on the Gimp.
I had to fly a Goony, and with four to choose from, none of which had been flown since 2020, I picked the Zoom Broom. While I had built the Star Snoop as a BT-80 bird back in 2001, the Zoom Broom was the first one that I built as a 1:1. I went with an 18mm motor, which took away a lot of recovery room, so I cut out as much of the bottom of the nose cone as possible so that the chute could fit better.
While the A8-3 provides more of a kick off the pad, the small size of the Goons really makes it unnecessary. This would have been perfect as it was with 13mm power, but at the time I was more interested in power, not tradition. The Broom swept off the pad to the right, topped out at 283' and popped the chute at apogee. The chute popped without shroud line drama and it drifted to a perfect recovery in short center.
The Estes Raven would be on pad for flight #8 on the afternoon. This was another eBay purchase of a rocket corpse much like the Rascal had been. I bought it to use the nose cone to clone an Estes National Aerospace Plane, only to have it arrive with the decal being the only thing really usable. The nose cone had been stepped on and required several sessions over a pan of boiling water to work it back into usable shape. Sometime later I bought a National Aerospace Plane kit and swapped the nose cone back after deciding to build the Raven. By then it had a serious amount of nose weight from trying to straighten out an awful wiggle in the NASP. This thing is a pig, but it looks good as it sits on the pad oinking.
This would be a B6-4 flight but probably could have been a C6-3 based on how things went. The Raven boosted right and looked to be trying to go nose down from the start. It topped out at 279' and began heading down immediately. After what seemed like an eternity the ejection charge fired, and it spun around violently when the chute filled. Recovery was perfect after that with a landing out in the short center weeds. Good thing it didn't core sample. It would have taken me weeks to clean up the BBs in the nose.
By this time in the day my shirt had long been soaked and was starting to wick moisture into my shorts. Every time I bent down a cascade of sweat dripped off my face. It was so uncomfortable that I would have to go home and let my shirt and shorts dry out for a few hours before heading out to cut the side yard. I didn't realize it yet, but the Estes Alien Invader would be my last flight of the day.
Speaking of eBay, this was cloned back in the days when the nose cone seemed like more of a myth than an actual part. I bought two aftermarket cones online, one a solid clear resin that was about 49/50 scale and didn't fit in any standard body tube, the other one was a traditional resin cone seen here. I had to epoxy a large screw eye into the back end of this one because the loop was clearly not going to withstand many ejection charges if any at all. The flight was on an A8-3, mostly because I was becoming too tired and hot to consider walking after it. It was an uneventful flight to 237' with ejection coming at apogee. It came almost straight back to the pad, landing just at the edge of the parking lot 20 feet from where I stood filming.
The heat was awful, but that wasn't what chased me off the field for the day. The thing that made me decide to pack it in was an igniter issue. Up to this point I had used the igniters that came with the motors I'd bought the night before, but that tin ran out and I dipped into the bag of vintage igniters that were in my traveling box. I tried them in a Mini Max and Goonybird Zero before I realized that, while they still looked viable, they had in fact been attacked by rust and broke off when the igniter plug was put in. All things considered, I broke things down, packed up and went home to enjoy some well deserved air conditioning.
