Here is my final story, and Im sticking to it:
So last Thursday, I decided I wanted to post cure the cotronics lay-ups in my dads powder coat oven. I used the recommended post cure (one hour at 250F and one hour at 350F) and sat and watched the oven to make sure I didnt burn down my dads place of business. When I took the thing out, the fillets had cracked badly. I think what happened is that it was past the Tg of the tube and once it had deformed the proline 4500 didnt want to deform with it and thus cracked. The cracking was well beyond the point of repair in order to insure a successful flight. Therefore, a last minute trip to Wildmans was in order to collect parts in order to build a new rocket. We cut the parts and I got home in time to sleep for an hour before I was to spend 12 hours in a muddy pipe doing hard work. This rocket was completely built within the space of two days. Here are a couple pictures of the new fin can, it actually came out way better than the first one.
Tuesday morning was D-day as it was the day I was leaving for Black Rock. I still had quite a few things to do in order to get the rocket ready to fly, including cutting G10 with a Dremel in the Brunos bathroom for the altimeter bay sled. I picked my roommate up along the way in Iowa and we were on our way.
After a long night of prep, fixing crashed Priuses (what is the plural for Prius?) and no sleep, the rocket was ready to fly around lunchtime on Saturday. My pad groupies included Alex (Aksrockets), Ryan Catanesi (Frozenferrari), my roommate Joel and my friend Spencer. We loaded the rocket on the pad, armed the altimeters, radioed to Bryce in the pits who was operating the Big Red Bee and retreated to a safe distance. Once the button was pushed, the thing took a second to think about what it wanted to do, but once it came up to pressure it left in a hurry. Time went very slow for me at this point as I wondered if it was going to be another disappointing shred or a great success. This time, it would be the latter of the two. After it burned out, we rejoiced at how awesome the flight was. Amidst all the cheer, we could hear Bryces voice over the radio reading out the altitude at which the rocket was. When he read out the apogee reading, we were even more excited as it seemed as though I had broken the Tripoli altitude record. When we got back to the pits, we soon realized that the altitude reading were in MSL and that I had actually missed the M record by just over 3K. Although I didnt break the record, I was still ecstatic that I had become one of very few that had flown a single M motor to over 40,000. We then got the GPS coordinates and plugged them into my phone. It showed it being pretty much in line with Black Rock point, so I pointed the car toward the Black Rock set my trip as it showed it being 3.3 miles out. Sure enough, once the trip hit 3.1 miles, I could see the hot pink parachute spread out on the playa. I still think its amazing that it only took me 15 minutes from when it flew to when I got it back, and most of that was hang time.
Here is a picture of me at the moment of discovery:
Here is a shot of the fin can post flight, zero delamination with zero post cure and zero protection of the leading edges. I think the paint stuck around JUST long enough to keep it from peeling up.
Here is a video of the flight taken by Alex Laraway, pad video provided by Ryan Catanesi:
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Now, the moment you have all been waiting for, the data. Flight stats (.fipa file attached below):
Apogee (from GPS data): 41,880 AGL
MaxV (from accel data): M3.2
Here is a screen shot from the .kml file in Google Earth (file attached below):
Just for kicks, here is a cool shot of one of the melted shear pin heads (taken by Joel Lynch):