I got one a while ago.. flown only once. on a horribly undersized engine..
A 1/4A mini...
rookie mistake
she reached apogee at about 8 or so feet, nosed into the turf of the soccer field.. and its really nice turf! I can ROG with a light wieght electric park flyer off that turf!
anyways.. 8 feet in the air.. arches over. plops nose first in the turf about 10 feet from the pad... the tracking smoke starts to pour out of it, the POP! the engine ejects from the tail end of the rocket in a cute little arc.
it was actually really funny in a anti-climatic sort of way.
the nose cone did pop off, or shall I say, the rocket poped off the cone... the wadding stayed in and is intact, so I just stuffed everything back into the rocket...
so now I have 3 more little 1/4A minis laying around, so I made a wee little rocket by smearing a 3x6" index card with elmers glue, wrapped that around the spent 1/4A, sawed off 0.25 of that engine to use as a thrust ring, fashinoned a nose cone from blue foam, and fins from some scrap balsa..
painted the whole thing down with thinned elmers and painted it with leftover paint from the bertha...
havent launched it yet.. should be interesing.