New member from GTA

Hello all! I'm a 39-year old father of two living in Mississauga ON who is getting back into rocketry after ~25 years. I got into the hobby through an after-school club in the late 80's. I still remember the amazement of my first launch. I built several rockets over the next few years from A motors to D. Several successful ones except every 2-stage I tried became a lawn dart.
Fast forward a couple decades and now my son is 7 and recently I bought him a launch set. It's an Estes Taser with some A8s for it. I went off great twice and both times he was thrilled. I have just started building one from scratch out of a wrapping paper tube as well as another Estes 2-stage in the mail.
Now that I'm back on this horse, I am hoping to more or less pick up where I left off and work towards high power certification eventually.
Once again, Hello and

Cabernut said:

Hello all! I'm a 39-year old father of two living in Mississauga ON who is getting back into rocketry after ~25 years. I got into the hobby through an after-school club in the late 80's. I still remember the amazement of my first launch. I built several rockets over the next few years from A motors to D. Several successful ones except every 2-stage I tried became a lawn dart.
Fast forward a couple decades and now my son is 7 and recently I bought him a launch set. It's an Estes Taser with some A8s for it. I went off great twice and both times he was thrilled. I have just started building one from scratch out of a wrapping paper tube as well as another Estes 2-stage in the mail.
Now that I'm back on this horse, I am hoping to more or less pick up where I left off and work towards high power certification eventually.
Once again, Hello and

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Welcome Cabernut, I am located in TO. I think you will find a lot of BARs in here who found there way back through their children. I rekindled my passion for the hobby just over two years ago now with my twins and now I am very much involved in the HP side. I still fly LP and MP rockets locally with my kids, so if yo want to know when a local launch is on let then just PM me.

Will do. By the way, how 'OK' is it to just go out to a large park around here and set off a B or C engine rocket?
- assuming that is, nowhere near the airport....

Cabernut said:

Will do. By the way, how 'OK' is it to just go out to a large park around here and set off a B or C engine rocket?
- assuming that is, nowhere near the airport....

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I'm a bit south of the border (Maryland), but a quick call to your local fire marshal usually can answer that question.

Welcome!

I hope you can find the answers you need here. Of course we hope you'll share too.

Pics are always fun.

Pointy Side Up!
Jim

Cabernut said:

Will do. By the way, how 'OK' is it to just go out to a large park around here and set off a B or C engine rocket?
- assuming that is, nowhere near the airport....

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Mississauga has the same issue as TO, in Mississauga the city Bi-Law 186-05 section 12, While in a park, no person shall: subsection 9 operate any remote-controlled or other powered devices, including but not limited
to, model versions of aircraft, rockets, watercraft and vehicles, other than in a designated area unless authorized by Permit.

I have volunteered with Astronuts, where we fly in a vacant or farmers field, great program to get involved in if you are passionate about rocketry and want to give back to young enthusiastic minds. I also belong to the Cambridge Rocketry Club and we have LP-MP launch sites. You should consider joining with your kids. For HPR I am a member of NAPAS, which is one of the older clubs in Canada however we lost our launch site about 2 years ago and are still trying to find a new one. I would not let that stop you from joining though as you can always get involved in helping us locate a new site.

Currently for my HP launches I also joined URRG in upstate NY and go down there, not often enough, for launches. Great bunch of people down there and the launch site is fantastic compared to what we could ever hope to get up here. They have regular club launches and have historically hosted some major events. I also like the NYPOWER launch, hosted by MARS in the spring, which is another fairly close HP launch you could attend, or even club you could join.

mpitfield said:

... I also belong to the Cambridge Rocketry Club and we have LP-MP launch sites. You should consider joining with your kids....

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Sounds like a plan.

I've just started tinkering with OpenRocket 15.03 and WOW. Very useful tool. I was up till 1am last night tweaking different designs to see what works, what doesn't. Going to read up on all the info on this site as well. Time to do my homework.

Cabernut said:

Sounds like a plan.

I've just started tinkering with OpenRocket 15.03 and WOW. Very useful tool. I was up till 1am last night tweaking different designs to see what works, what doesn't. Going to read up on all the info on this site as well. Time to do my homework.

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OR is a great tool, very accurate if you tweak your model. I run RockSim, OpenRocket as well as RASAero, all have limits, but I find using all of them very helpful and consider them my core tools for the faster higher alt rockets. Although I find myself using OR more these days as the lead tool and sadly finding the value of RS less and less...but that is another discussion and will open up a can of worms. Bottom line OR is a great tool, and intuitive.

Just wanted to clarify that the MARS club in Geneseo, NY holds a number of two day launches during the year. NYPower is a three day launch.

Cabernet;

You should consider joining the Cambridge Rocket Club. We have several launch sites including a sod farm in Guelph. The weather is not on our side now and the field is very wet. Keep in touch and join us for one of our monthly launches, your kids will love it.

I have tried to go to several of the launches with the Cambridge Rocketry Club. I even drove once this past December with wife in tow and it had been cancelled without being posted. This month's launch was also cancelled. Read back several months.... sounds like you guys haven't had a launch in awhile. Maybe if a launch gets cancelled not wait an entire month to do another one? Otherwise nothing will ever go up. Just a thought

Sorry to hear about the trip. We have had bad luck lately with weather and our next launch is scheduled for February 13th. We try to post any cancellation on our website. Please feel free to post prior to the launch if you are in doubt.

The way I look at it, this time of year in Ontario, hard to have a launch day scheduled or not. Calm winds and no precip is hard to come by. Since it's an hour plus drive for me, I wouldn't leave unless I knew for sure it was still on.

On Christmas morning, the weather was perfect for launching so I found a large empty park nearby. My son and I had fun launching a few. No one gave us a hard time as no one was around... Would be better as a group for sure though.

I've been wondering though, how does the theme work? Next months theme is Anything Red. Is blaze orange close enough? :lol: Could I sneak in a blue one? :wink:
Oh yeah, also what range of motors do you guys normally fly? I have plenty of LPR and one Ventris I would like to try on an F.

You may want to attend URRF III in upstate New York in June. If you do, I don't know how the border patrols react to rocket motors, so it may be better to bring everything except the motors and buy them on site.

Cabernut said:

The way I look at it, this time of year in Ontario, hard to have a launch day scheduled or not. Calm winds and no precip is hard to come by. Since it's an hour plus drive for me, I wouldn't leave unless I knew for sure it was still on.

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There are a few that drive in from GTA and I'm in Niagara which is just as far. Gary usually emails a Go/Nogo a day or so ahead so what you need to do is get on his email list. The website has been dead for a while but now is slowly being reactivated.

On Christmas morning, the weather was perfect for launching so I found a large empty park nearby. My son and I had fun launching a few. No one gave us a hard time as no one was around... Would be better as a group for sure though.

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There is a healthy fine should you catch a cop in a bad mood. So I told you so. :surprised:

I've been wondering though, how does the theme work? Next months theme is Anything Red. Is blaze orange close enough? :lol: Could I sneak in a blue one? :wink:
Oh yeah, also what range of motors do you guys normally fly? I have plenty of LPR and one Ventris I would like to try on an F.

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You can fly anything provided its safe, red or other, its just a theme to play along with. The Paisly site allows up to G motors though if they are high fliers the wind could cost you the rocket.


Richard

Bat-mite said:

You may want to attend URRF III in upstate New York in June. If you do, I don't know how the border patrols react to rocket motors, so it may be better to bring everything except the motors and buy them on site.

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I have boatloads of experience with border crossing & customs guys. I used to commute across the border every day for work a few years back. Yup, not worth losing your motors. I'd rather pay a visit to Hobby Lobby after crossing. I wonder what would happen if I brought across a 6" upscale Bull Pup or something strapped to the roof?

Cabernut said:

I have boatloads of experience with border crossing & customs guys. I used to commute across the border every day for work a few years back. Yup, not worth losing your motors. I'd rather pay a visit to Hobby Lobby after crossing. I wonder what would happen if I brought across a 6" upscale Bull Pup or something strapped to the roof?

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If you got my brother-in-law as a customs inspector, you'd be fine... I did ask him about bringing motors across the border, and he couldn't think of a reason why it wouldn't be allowed. However, not all customs guys may be as reasonable...

Chris

Cabernut said:

The way I look at it, this time of year in Ontario, hard to have a launch day scheduled or not. Calm winds and no precip is hard to come by. Since it's an hour plus drive for me, I wouldn't leave unless I knew for sure it was still on.

On Christmas morning, the weather was perfect for launching so I found a large empty park nearby. My son and I had fun launching a few. No one gave us a hard time as no one was around... Would be better as a group for sure though.

I've been wondering though, how does the theme work? Next months theme is Anything Red. Is blaze orange close enough? :lol: Could I sneak in a blue one? :wink:
Oh yeah, also what range of motors do you guys normally fly? I have plenty of LPR and one Ventris I would like to try on an F.

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I live in Toronto. Send me an e-mail ([email protected]) and perhaps we could hook-up.