Today's the day... post mortem day. I'll be posting several times throughout the day as I gather my photos and my thoughts.
The rocket has a major design flaw. If you've been following the thread, you'll know that the core structure is the inner blue tube, and the large parts on the outside are effectively a facade. Here we see the pyrotechnics module in the forward section of the rocket. If you look at it from the context of this inner structure, this is the ebay of a dual deployment rocket. The only real difference is that the electronics are external to this, with just the pyrotechnics where the ebay would be. This is held in place in the forward section with plastic rivets. At apogee, the drogue deploys from the rear section, and the main ejects through the nose.
The problem is that the two sections have to mate and that proved extremely difficult. We spent about an hour trying to make it work. I'd had it together before, but that was without the rivets. We just weren't able to get it fit. So we went with Plan B. We removed the rivets, and reconfigure the wiring so the main would deploy at apogee... effectively a single deployment configuration. I risked loosing the pyro bay (my electronics were pretty secure but I may have ripped the wires off), but this is literally the last chance I had to fly before moving off the continent. So that's what we did. It still took an effort but we were able to get the parts to mate.
You'll notice that a lot of the LES structure is missing. More on that later.
While trying to get the pieces to mate, we did some minor damage. A few of the 3D printed details came off. More importantly, the switches on my clustering electronics got knocked off of the mount. I knew this mount was poorly designed. I'd forgotten to include spots for the battery switches so they had been CA glued to the plastic. I've yet to have what I consider to be a reliable CA glue joint, including this and several of the details on the exterior that keep getting knocked off. In the end, I had to secure the switches using good old duct tape.
Also, the switch on the PCB used to check cluster igniter continuity got knocked off so I wasn't able to use that feature at all. More about that when I talk clustering.
So that's it for post 1. I'll post more later today.