LUNAR Snow Ranch March Launch 3/7

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o1d_dude

'I battle gravity'
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The weather forecast for that day isn't looking good. Rain showers beginning Friday 3/6 and continuing through Wednesday 3/11.

In the middle of a so-called drought (it's an historical weather pattern as per those who track such things) we are plagued with launch date rain. Rocketry is hard in Northern California.

My tube fin dual deploy rocket is ready and I expect to put it up at our next launch...whenever that might be. May even have my Goblin 5.5 in flyable condition, too.

So what are you rocketeers planning to bring?
 
Is that only 2 weeks away? Wow! Where does the time go?

If the launch happens on the 7th, I'll probably be flying the same lineup as last time --- pod rocket, G-Force, leviathan. But I'll be using my CTI hardware and reloads, and I'll be taking your advice Kit and SC to fly them all a little more aggressively on bigger motors.

If it gets rained out and pushed to the next week, I'll be on a backpacking trip and won't make it.

I've got to get started on my Warlock, but it probably won't be ready in March.
 
If the launch happens on the 7th I'll miss it but the 8th, 14th, and 15th all could be possible. If I go I'd probably fly the following rockets:

Mini Magg-I236 Blue or I216 Classic. I'm leaning towards the I216 as it would probably break my current altitude record, but the I236 would be better if there is wind.
38mm BAR Crayon, not sure about motor but possibly an H133 Blue and/or I180 Skidmark.
Mega Blue Max on an H53 mellow or some other motor.
I might fly my Warlock, not sure.
 
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Weather forecast for March 7th is improving. It's gone from "occasional showers" to "mostly cloudy". Woo hoo!

Tried stuffing the main recovery gear into the payload section of my tube fin DD bird. The main chute is a 36" Fruity Chutes and fits into the payload section with some room to spare for the tubular nylon. Cutting off the end of the nose cone shoulder and installing a bulk plate inside to anchor the shock cord made a big difference. I love it when a plan comes together.

Planning to put the tuber up on an I212SS for it's maiden DD flight. All up weight (motor and hardware included) is now 90.3oz. Flight sims at 8.8g's off the pad and apogee at 1500'. If all goes well, I have a CTI I255 Red Lightning for the follow up flight.
 
Any of the four days, I will be there. I am still bummed about missing the last!

Party at the qquake blue truck?
 
It turns out I'll miss this one, but I'll be there in April no matter what! This will give me time to build though, maybe even will have my F75 and Vindicator ready for April.
 
If we're not rained out, I'll probably be flying my purple crayon a couple of times, (I want in on the Drag race this time!) but I'll be focused mostly on the A Parachute duration contest, if it's being done this month. (I can't remember. I guess I could look it up, but I'm being especially lazy tonight.)

Oh, and I'll see about taking a shift at LCO / SCO

(The Kraken is grounded until the top half is painted and the final decals are applied.)
 
I secretly hope for a rain date so I can get more done on my Punisher first, hah! Oh, and I might give LCO a shot. I think I can do HPR safety control too, now?
 
I'll definitely be flying Binary Effusion on her maiden flight. I have two CTI H163 White Thunders to push her into the air. Other than that, I haven't decided what I'll bring yet. Kinda sorta thinking about flying my upscale Freefall again.

And the party at the blue truck is BYOB!


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Mean Machine on an F12, maybe? It's been a looooong time since I've flown Mean Machine, and never on an F.

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I'm getting anxious to fly some rockets! Kinda twitchy!

One of my good friends asked me to give a presentation about rockets to some cub scouts tonight. These are tiger cubs, about 6 years old. I wanted to show a little flair, so I put on my best steely-eyed missile man face and told them, "My name is Eric, and I FLY ROCKETS!" It worked. Somehow they were kind of stunned into silence. I had their rapt attention. These kids had been going absolute bananas a few minutes before, but they settled right down to hear about rockets. It was great! They paid attention and asked some great questions. But after telling them all about it, I'm ready to go fly some rockets! I feel like I'm six years old and waiting to go fly a rocket!
 
Weather is shaping up to be outstanding:cool:

Low 70's, light wind 5 mph or less (needed to keep bees, flies, and fog away), clear, sunny.... Start prepping

The Black Fleet this launch:

* Intimidator 3" - Aerotech K456DM
* Wildman Shredder - Aerotech J401FJ
* Binder Design Stealth - Aerotech I327DM
 
Indeed, the forecast looks perfect. Can't wait!! I missed January due to still being on the East Coast (too close to the holiday), and February to a vacation in Vegas (2/7 would have worked but not 2/14), so I'm glad I won't miss this one.

I had built 4 motors in addition to having an I280DM to fly at TCC 2/21, but only managed to get two flights due to the morning clouds and other things I was involved with (like only getting 44/50 on my L2 exam :facepalm:). And I did the first flight of my Excel DD at TCC (that was the I280DM, didn't want to risk losing one of my brand-new casings on the maiden flight), so I'm looking forward to more flights (it's still primer-only unfortunately, haven't finished my paint booth yet to put the colors on). So I have 3 motors already built and waiting to fly (I161W and an I287SS for Bumbl-B mk III and an I297SK for dd.xls), and other reloads should I take care of those.

Also going to give my AltimeterThree another shot and hopefully get some flight data out of it this time (there have been FW/SW updates since 2/21 so I'm hoping things will be better). And hopefully fly my EasyMini for the first time, provided I can get my wiring harness hooked up to it before then (the screw terminals on it are MUCH smaller than I had expected, so all of my wire gauges need adjusting).
 
Line up change due to slight winds and cloudless skies....

The Black Fleet this launch:

* Intimidator 3" - Aerotech K456DM
* Wildman Jr Two Stage - I357T x2
* Binder Design Stealth - Aerotech I327DM
 
Saturday is the last basketball game of the year. I'm sad that I'll miss this launch, but glad BB will be over for next month's launch.
 
Looking like I'm going to have to skip this launch, as well. Too many other people/things need my attention this weekend. I'll be out there for April. (Maybe even with the final paint on the King Kraken DD)
 
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Saturday is the last basketball game of the year. I'm sad that I'll miss this launch, but glad BB will be over for next month's launch.

Oh no! I was hoping to show off the Punisher. Well, maybe I can find a way to make April after all.
 
An April launch remains to be seen. Historically, the weather has been problematic.

Kinda recall Bill Orvis flying a kite at one of our Snow Ranch April launches.

Fingers crossed.
 
An April launch remains to be seen. Historically, the weather has been problematic.

Kinda recall Bill Orvis flying a kite at one of our Snow Ranch April launches.

Fingers crossed.

I haven't been going to Snow Ranch for long, but this is what I've been hearing --- April is often a blowout from wind, and May is often canceled due to fire danger. This is not a great weekend for me, but I think I am going to try as hard as possible to make it, because it could be the last of the season at Snow Ranch.

After that, it is extra-long drives to any HPR events for me, and other than TCC's Dairy Aire in April, it might be all LPR/MPR at Moffett until October Skies.
 
I hope it's a go. i was planning on doing my L1 at the April launch. If it gets cancelled I guess it is Dairy Air for me.
 
I haven't been going to Snow Ranch for long, but this is what I've been hearing --- April is often a blowout from wind, and May is often canceled due to fire danger. This is not a great weekend for me, but I think I am going to try as hard as possible to make it, because it could be the last of the season at Snow Ranch.

After that, it is extra-long drives to any HPR events for me, and other than TCC's Dairy Aire in April, it might be all LPR/MPR at Moffett until October Skies.

I hope there is an April launch. I think I may try to get to some of the monthly TCC launches after April (or maybe the April launch), but they are a long trip. I can't wait for Dairy Aire in May.
 
Here are a few snaps from the most awesome launch at Snow Ranch in quite a long time.

Jim's friend/launch team member Olga routinely counts the number of cars present and this launch had 170 cars in the parking area.

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Here's my Steppin' Razor DD prepped and ready to rumble. TRF member hball55 regaling us with an account of his shovel recovery on an earlier flight.

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Qquake2k has already posted the launch pad shot and the boost video so here's the down on the ground shot. As usual, my rockets tend to find any available water. This time the shock cord spans the creek like a slack line and the booster is about 12" from the edge of the drop off into the water. The electronics bay fortunately laned about 6' from the water, and the remainder of the recovery train was more distant. Thank goodness the shock cords were 15' and 25' long.

BTW, the rocket is fluorescent pink, a color that doesn't photograph well with digital cameras. The addition of the white payload bay really makes the colors pop.

I was initially quite anxious over my first dual deploy flight but convinced myself the flight would either be interesting or REALLY interesting. Worries for naught as ground testing the day before gave me the right amount of special sauce to separate the components reliably and the rest was just things I'd done many times before.

The really interesting flight was next one. In the campground area I'd achieved the perfect burrito wrap but neglected to attach the chute swivel to the shock cord quicklink. Of course there was separation at apogee but fortunately the nomex blanket was enough to keep the rocket coming down in a flat spin and there was no damage. None. The force is strong in those crayon banks. After a leisurely float under full canopy and slack risers, the 30" black and white Fruity Chute landed safely in the field a hundred yards or so away...much closer than the rocket which was easily a quarter mile distant.

Overall it was a Snow Ranch launch that will be remembered for many years.

I laughed. I cried. I fell down.
 
Man, I'm sorry I missed the launch.

I did get to spend the morning / afternoon with my 6-year-old a local book release party for a new children's author. She had come to his classroom last week and done a writer's workshop with the kids. He wanted to look at her website on Friday when he got home from school - and we found out her book launch was Saturday. HE REALLY wanted to go, so he and I took BART to Oakland to get a copy of her new book (which she autographed) and meet the author (again.) I think Greg and I were the only 2 there who were not employees of the store or friends/family of the author. She read her book to the 8 kids (and 20-30 adults!) that came. She also did a character design / illustration activity with the kids. Greg had a lot of fun, (and so did I) even if there were no rocket launches involved.

Still would have been nice to make it out to the Ranch yesterday. By all reports it was a good day to fly rockets!
 
It was a great day at the Ranch! The weather was beautiful --- shorts and short sleeves all day long, plus plenty of sunscreen and a wide-brimmed hat. There was very slight breeze that would gust up now and then, but not bad. We've been short of rain lately and will probably have another year of severe drought, but the upside is that the field was not at all muddy, and the creek was easy to cross.

This time I only brought two rockets. I wanted to focus on flying my newish G-Force and on using my new CTI hardware and reloads for the first time. I also brought the Leviathan as a backup in case anything prevented me from finishing out the day with the G-Force.

The first flight was the G-Force on a CTI G68 white drilled to 6 seconds. As everyone has said, the CTI motors are easy, but I still took time to read every instruction, and I had a fellow rocketeer named Skip take a look at the setup to be sure I had done it correctly. Everything went of perfectly, and the rocket flew to pretty much the same altitude and speed that I have seen using Aerotech single-use G motors of different types --- the 2-Grain CTI G's are similar in total impulse to the AT SU G's. The ejection was perfect. There was a slight waggle as the rocket left the rod that straightened out in short order, but it did catch my eye and raised a slight red flag. I had not seen any such unsteadiness in the rocket before when using the AT G's --- even a G40 was nice and solid. I don't know if there was a gust of wind as it took off or some other factor, but it made me wonder if any of my millions of coats of paint or the 3-grain motor hardware had shifted the CG aft any.

Next up, I wanted to try a 3-grain G. I chose a G131 Smokey Sam. I removed the delay grain and drilled it to 7 seconds, and when I went to put it back in the liner, I noticed a groove molded all the way around the delay grain housing. Something didn't look right about it. The only CTI motor I had ever flown before was the G68 I had loaded up maybe 45 minutes earlier, but I was pretty sure I remembered an O-ring sitting in that groove in the G68. I checked all around my workspace to see if it had somehow fallen off, which seemed very unlikely, and I didn't find anything. I asked Skip, and he said he thought they always had an O-ring, but he couldn't be absolutely positive about ALL motors. I checked over at the BAR trailer and asked they guy who helps out Mike (forgot his name), and he was not absolutely positive either. So he directed me to a group of three other guys who were all pretty certain that it should have been manufactured with an O-ring. One thing everyone agreed on was that if it was supposed to have an O-ring, then it definitely NEEDED that O-ring, and the rocket would probably be destroyed by the motor failure that would happen if it didn't have an O-ring. The solution was to buy another G131 from BAR and check that motor --- sure enough, it had an O-ring. So now I have a confirmed defective motor that I'll have to contact CTI about.

So I finished up loading the G131. When I went to pack all the recovery gear, I noticed that the coupler for the recovery bay was much tighter in the lower section of BT than before the previous launch. I mean MUCH tighter! It seems like the ejection charge really fouled the surfaces quite a bit. I spent some time sanding and got everything to slide together to my satisfaction. By the time I had dealt with the O-ring issue and cleaned up the recovery bay, I had spent more than 2 hours between the first launch and the second, which is a bit long. The launch went off well. It was another good flight, and according to sims was about 200 feet higher than on the G68, which I would say looked about right to me. The ejection was right at apogee.

After that flight I started to prep the G-Force again and noticed that again the coupler was very tight. I felt like I had really dodged a bullet in finding the missing O-ring before the last flight. I also felt like I had avoided a deployment failure by fixing the tight coupler. And that waggle on the first launch was still on my mind, making me wonder about the CG. The next motor was supposed to be a 4-grain H in a 6-grain case with spacers, which might exacerbate any problems with CG, and I wasn't sure why the coupler kept getting fouled. I decided that I had been pretty lucky so far with some close calls, so instead of trying to press forward with cleaning the bay again and doing a on-the-spot mind sim of the CG with a loaded motor, I decided to just fly the Leviathan.

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.

That was it for flights for me. If I had gotten there earlier, and had not had such a long delay between the first and second flight, I could maybe have gotten another one up, but it was till a fantastic day. I got to meet up with qquake2k and old_dude --- always a pleasure, gentlemen! 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.

One other item of note, there were a lot of rocketeers in attendance at this launch, but the lines at the RSO table were noticeably shorter. I didn't get the full story, but there was apparently a whole extra bank of HPR pads that we don't usually have. That really sped things up a lot!

Great day!
 
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.

...

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:
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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
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And launch
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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:
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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:
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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.
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Part two in the next post.
 
Part two

After launching my mom's rocket was when ThirstyBarbarian and I decided to drag race. I was finishing up preparing my Madcow Scooter when I invited him over for some tri tip, and I suggested that we drag race. He agreed, so when he was done eating, we loaded the rockets on the pads, and watched them go. Like he said above, my rocket went off first, with his lighting about a second after. Mine took forever to come down, especially because the chute is oversized for it, but at least the walk to retrieve it was less then last month.
Mine going:
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Followed by ThirstyBarbarian's:
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While I was up on the hill retrieving my rocket, I managed to get a cool panoramic photo of the launch site, and a photo of the glider being launched.
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I also got this photo of the crayon drag race:
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Overall it was another great launch. Even though I only launched my Scooter once, and launched a LPR once, it was still fun. I helped my friend get his rocket ready, and met somebody from the forum in person, which was nice.

Also, as we were packing up at the end, a gentleman walking by noticed my rocket holder I made that hangs from a pop-up tent. I ended up telling him that for $25 it was his, and he accepted the offer.

Nevermind, apparently ShadowAero has a patent on it.


Cheers,
Kyle Rodrigues
 

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