I prepped the Leviathan with a single-use G77-7R. I met up with RC Dude who was also prepping a rocket on a G motor, so we decided to do a drag race. His rocket was much lighter that mine and simmed to around 2,500 feet on that motor, while mine simmed to about 1,400 on my motor, so we knew it wouldn't be much of a race, but it was still fun. His rocket took off nearly a full second before mine (CTI loads take off IMMEDIATELY) and was off like a shot. By the time his rocket reached apogee, it was no longer naked-eye visible for me, but he was still able to see it. Mine put in a pretty good flight too.
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And I spent a good amount of time with rc dude and his family and friends --- very nice people! They gave me a tri-tip sandwich, cole slaw, and potato salad before the drag race, and they may have actually saved my life! I tend to get excited about what I am doing, and forget to eat until I nearly pass out, so thanks rc dude for looking out for me.
My motor wasn't a CTI, it was an AT G64-7. I think it was just by chance that it lit faster. And your welcome for the food. I have kind of made it tradition to smoke some tri tip on friday to eat at the launch, so come by next month and have some more!
I think I may as well throw up my launch report too.
My dad, my cousin and a friend left at about 8:30, and arrived at Snow Ranch at about 9:50. We got our spot set up, an my friend picked up his parachute and chute protector from BAR. By this time, my little cousin was bugging me to go launch his rockets, so I told hime we could drag race, my Baby Bertha versus his Wizard. So we both loaded up C6-7s, and launched them. I won because he had a bad igniter.
Next my friend wanted to launch his Madcow Patriot 2.6", so we loaded up an AT G61 in my 38/360 case with the RAS. We got it set up, and went to launch it. About a second after it left the pad, the ejection charge went off, which caused the parachute to deploy and ended his flight. After taking apart the motor, it appears like we had some bad luck and had a bad delay grain. We had drilled it to 6 seconds, but that shouldn't have caused the failure. Here is a photo of the flight:
So we went back to BAR and he bought another G61 reload, and a new chute since the first one had torn a shroud line. We assembled the reload with the help of the gentleman helping Mike at BAR (I don't remember his name), and he confirmed we had assembled it correctly. We left the delay at 8 seconds this time, just to be sure. The next flight went perfectly, except the delay was a little long, which we expected. Here are some photos of that flight:
Me inserting the igniter
And launch
I then met up with ThirstyBarbarian, as my friend was looking to get his L1 and we needed two people to sign off. It was as he was waiting to launch his G-force, so I managed to get these pictures of his G-Force:
During all of this, my cousin was launching his rockets, since I taught him how to load the motors and pack the parachutes. He must have launched at least half a dozen times, including two time where he drag raced himself.
One of his drag races against himself:
By that time my mom, sister, aunt, uncle and my other cousin showed up. This meant it was time to launch my mom's Quest Superbird, which we had built on Thursday and painted Friday. She named it the "Candy Cane", after we painted it red with a white stripe. It was a nice flight, straight up and deployed at apogee. Then my cousin wanted to drag race her, so that is the second picture.
Part two in the next post.