EXPjawa
Well-Known Member
I'll put this here since I don't see a better place for it. A few people might have noticed the posts I've made of some of my recent builds in the last day or so, but I probably got a head of myself by not introducing myself first.
My name is Rick, I'm in western NY state (now very snowy), and I've got a rocket...issue. I did a lot of rocket modeling in the late '80s-early'90s when I was a teenager. There was a LHS that was walking distance from the high school, so for a guy that rode his bike home, it was an easy stop. I used to fly in my parent's large side yard, the school grounds with a local club, etc. After I started college, though, I more or less got out of it. The last two rockets I built, as I recall were the Estes Pro Series Jayhawk & the Terrier-Sandhawk.
Fast forward a few years, I found myself occasionally buying a kit I found interesting only to ferret it away. But it wasn't until last year that a nephew (on the west coast) got interested in rocketry after I pointed my brother-in-law to their local club launches. Shortly afterward, that led to a niece that lives here also becoming interested. So we found our local club, went to a launch, she built a rocket, I repaired several old rockets, and we launched with the club. I started digging out the kit stockpile. And while working on those, my attention turned to upscales and scratch building, etc. Then I found RockSim. That was toward the end of last year, and more or less leads us to what you've seen in the past day or so, because it wasn't until this week that I decided it would be useful to sign up on this site. The crappy cell phone photos below show what I had ready to fly (if not quite finished) as of the first of the year, assuming you can make heads or tails of them:
Unfortunatley, I don't get to see my west-coast family very often, so I'm not sure when or if I'll get to launch with my nephew. But I think I can share the hobby with him by occasionally putting together clone "kits" that I can send him of rockets that he probably wouldn't know about. Like the Advanced Target Drone, for example.
So, hello, my name is Rick & I'm a Born Again Rocketeer...
My name is Rick, I'm in western NY state (now very snowy), and I've got a rocket...issue. I did a lot of rocket modeling in the late '80s-early'90s when I was a teenager. There was a LHS that was walking distance from the high school, so for a guy that rode his bike home, it was an easy stop. I used to fly in my parent's large side yard, the school grounds with a local club, etc. After I started college, though, I more or less got out of it. The last two rockets I built, as I recall were the Estes Pro Series Jayhawk & the Terrier-Sandhawk.
Fast forward a few years, I found myself occasionally buying a kit I found interesting only to ferret it away. But it wasn't until last year that a nephew (on the west coast) got interested in rocketry after I pointed my brother-in-law to their local club launches. Shortly afterward, that led to a niece that lives here also becoming interested. So we found our local club, went to a launch, she built a rocket, I repaired several old rockets, and we launched with the club. I started digging out the kit stockpile. And while working on those, my attention turned to upscales and scratch building, etc. Then I found RockSim. That was toward the end of last year, and more or less leads us to what you've seen in the past day or so, because it wasn't until this week that I decided it would be useful to sign up on this site. The crappy cell phone photos below show what I had ready to fly (if not quite finished) as of the first of the year, assuming you can make heads or tails of them:
Unfortunatley, I don't get to see my west-coast family very often, so I'm not sure when or if I'll get to launch with my nephew. But I think I can share the hobby with him by occasionally putting together clone "kits" that I can send him of rockets that he probably wouldn't know about. Like the Advanced Target Drone, for example.
So, hello, my name is Rick & I'm a Born Again Rocketeer...