What did you do rocket wise today?

jadebox said:

I'm celebrating the recovery of my "YouBee!" It spent more than a month in some pine trees. But, now it's safe in the back of a pickup truck!

A pair of newlyweds, honeymooning by hunting in the woods, found it. Honest.

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-- Roger

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You must be living right. Glad it came home, and with a story too.

Launched my first AP birds today! What a rush!





Posted over at the Mid Power section with details.

Mike

Im not sure if its rocketwize, but its got rocket stuff in it.
I made my GF a little box out of CF plate, and aluminum. I spent the better part of the day with a jigsaw and a lathe.



Alex

SEVRA launched 60 rockets today despite an average temp of 43.2°F. I flew a G, a 3C6 cluster, a 2C11 cluster and a 1/2A.

Since the LUNAR moffett launch canceled, I added around 9.5 oz of weight to the nose of my Magg in the form of a large bolt. Hopefully it'll fly the whole L1 range now without veering with the wind! I'm planning to fly an I175 in it in 2 weeks.

Fitted the Rail Guides to my Patriot Upgrade.

Cl(VII) said:

You must be living right. Glad it came home, and with a story too.

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Thanks. We've known all along generally where it was. But, somehow the 12-foot tall rocket with a 10-foot parachute managed to hide. The main deployed at apogee and it drifted, I guess, about two miles. Most of the area is open fields, but it found some trees to land in. A group of people living near the launch site made it their mission to find the rocket. I'm not sure if the couple who did find it were, at the time, hunting for sport, food, or my rocket.

-- Roger

Yeah, that wouldn't be good. You come down from the East Bay, right?

rbelknap said:

At least I checked before I left instead of thinking I should after already crossing the dumbarton bridge...

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Bought the older boys a rocket. Wasn't going to but I couldn't resist the sale I got on them.

Photographed several of my TLP missile replicas.

Went to Lowe's in search of yet more stainless hardware and came home with some parts that after a bit of experimentation I realized weren't going to work as well as the original solution. Now I'm just going to use t-nuts to secure the "stopper" to the nose cone av-bay bulkplate of the Polecat Goblin.

On the same project, I glued three 1/"2x1/2"x1" blocks to the bottom of the nose cone av-bay bulkplate so that I drill through the nose cone shoulder to anchor it in place with screws. Now that the plans have crystalized, the location of the terminal strip, charge well, and rotary switch have been determined, all that's necessary is to get it all put together.

Tomorrow I'm back to Lowe's for some stainless steel t-nuts and will have to drill out the existing 1/4" holes to 5/16" to fit the new t-nuts.

I may be old but at least I'm slow.

Messed around with cutting mylar and paper crepe streamers. The crepe ones hold an acordion fold better than I thought they would. Also not as delicate as I thought, too.

Decided that the next rocket will be the Estes Reflector. With a bit of the shoulder of the nose cone cut off, the payload pay is almost a perfect size for my just-arrived PerfectFlite Firefly altimeter. Might even try some custom lettering on the side of the rocket: ATV for Altimeter Testing Vehicle. The way the payload section tapers down to the main body tube gives the rocket a little of ULA Delta feel.

I spent some time assembling one of FlisKits' cardstock rockets (https://www.fliskits.com/products/free_dl/paper_rockets/caution_rocket.htm) That actually turned out to be pretty fun! Will be interesting to see how well it flies.

Worked on the Arapahoe-J. Sanded for an hour and a half, then sprayed another coat of primer.

Started two new projects. Cherokee D/E, I think my brother had an original back in the day. Probably first launch with a fat C. Made motor mount and fins.

Other project is much larger, 43", E power, upper and lower fins with pods - calling it "Escape" for now. Scavenged some parts from a Mean Machine kit I got on clearance. Made motor mount, papered fins, got the basic design in Open Rocket to get and idea of the CG and flight simulation.

Also used Open Rocket to create a scale fin template for a "micro" Bertha. BT-20 with 13mm power.

Fiberglass Cloth Layups, Primer on a Tail Section, and glazed a Cone with Finishing Epoxy.
Also worked more on Open Rocket Sims.

Joined NAR.

Did a lot of work on my Polecat Goblin's nose cone alt bay and I see light at the end of the tunnel...or maybe it's the altimeter's flashing LED.

Booted up one of my RRC2+ to verify POST and beep tones.

Cut out the sled and marked component placement and mounting holes.

Did a test assembly of the entire unit to verify fit and access.

Next step is to epoxy plywood and tube elements for sled together and to epoxy centering inside nose cone shoulder.

Glue fillets on a couple of simultaneous builds.

Built a mini mosquito...okay took only five minutes total time. Started a second and decided I wanted to make a two stage mini skeeter. So waiting until my Christmas present of an x-acto set is opened to cut down the second skeeter into a booster. Should be a fun and only flight on this one lol.

Mike

Dry fit the components of my Talos Sustainer and did some revision to the preliminary OR Sim.

Messed with open rocket. Made designs for various rockets of the minimum diameter variety. Also designed a rocket that can fly single deploy on a 1-grain 54mm motor, particularly the I165 C-Star.

Aksrockets said:

Im not sure if its rocketwize, but its got rocket stuff in it.
I made my GF a little box out of CF plate, and aluminum. I spent the better part of the day with a jigsaw and a lathe.
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Alex

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Your GF has a nice box !

Kenny

KenRico said:

Your GF has a nice box !

Kenny

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Ayyyyooooooooo

My NEW ham vanity call showed up in the ULS database this morning, so I fired up my beeline transmitter and updated it to use the new call. (Also futz around with the drivers to try to get chirp on my mac to talk to my uv-5r to update the welcome message on it. Gave up and used the already configured work PC to reprogram the beeline and the radio.)

used the measurements on the punisher thread to add a bunch of mass overrides to my ork file.

Bought a Sheri's Mercury Redstone kit on Fleabay.... Feedback looks good, hoping it isn't a scam....

Looked at a few Estes kits at Hobby Lobby while shopping for a silver Sharpie to use in marking up my Punisher and 3" BlackStar.

Started looking at my available Materials and realized I have plenty of stuff to begin yet another BT-80 Based Military Scale Build.
Time to start looking for another Missile to model!

ETA: Looks like I've settled on doing a 29mm AIM-120 AMRAAM.
I really wanted to do an AGM-88 HARM, but when I looked at the pics' of the actual Missile, I realized that the Nosecone would present a much greater challenge than I have the equipment or skills to produce right now. I'm too busy with the Talos Ramjet Cone to get into an odd thing like the HARM Cone. I can get away with using the TLP Ogive Nose Cone that cavecentral gave me recently with zero modifications to do an AIM-120.
I just did one in BT-60x24mm, so it will be easy to just upscale with all the Data I already have on hand.

Got my Fin Templates drawn up.

Cut 5+ lbs of carbon fiber, fiberglass and uni-carbon strips for my 10.25" dia. Cherokee-N.

Bagged up about 50 engine mounts,
Printed, folded and collated 50 sets of instructions,
Folded and bagged 50 parachutes . . .

All for Little Green Man and Pigasus kits!

Prepped the kids MPR for altimeter deployment and made deployment lighters