My G altitude rocket

Here is my G altitude rocket. Its been completed for a while now i have just been too afraid of losing it so I have yet to fly it. I was planning to fly it this past Saturday on a CTI G150 BS for speed before adding nose weight and going for altitude on a g65. the rocket is all scratch built carbon fiber everything hand made from the bt to the coupler and fin stock. the rocket will carry a Featherweight Raven and a CSI tracker. Next month it will fly at our clubs October Skies launch. The rocket is 20.188 inches long.

This is awesome! Good luck.

Totally wicked man! Very nicely done!




Braden

maxvelocity said:

Here is my G altitude rocket. Its been completed for a while now i have just been too afraid of losing it so I have yet to fly it. I was planning to fly it this past Saturday on a CTI G150 BS for speed before adding nose weight and going for altitude on a g65. the rocket is all scratch built carbon fiber everything hand made from the bt to the coupler and fin stock. the rocket will carry a Featherweight Raven and a CSI tracker. Next month it will fly at our clubs October Skies launch. The rocket is 20.188 inches long.

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You say it's "all carbon fiber". Have you tried the tracking beacon on the ground? Sometimes RF will not go through a carbon body tube (it is conductive and can form a Faraday Cage). Looks like a sweet, slick rocket!

Yes I've tried it on the ground and works very well. The tracker will sit just as its shown and the antenna will go down and then bend back up into the upper airframe. There will be a loop in the shockcord that the antenna will go through and at deployment the antenna will be pulled out of the upper airframe. The amount of antenna that sticks out was tested and works at about 250+ yards and there was a very strong signal so I figure I have little to no interference after deployment. Thanks for the compliments guys

Very nice. Did you add nose weight?

No nose weight yet I want to see how fast it will go before adding weight to get it to optimal mass

maxvelocity said:

No nose weight yet I want to see how fast it will go before adding weight to get it to optimal mass

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The fins look a little small to me. Make sure that you have a tall tower to launch from (6 feet or more) and/or a low-wind day. Also --and this is critical-- make sure that your mass is laterally centered in your rocket. You can check this by hanging the fins off the edge of a table and see if the rocket has a preferred roll orientation. If it does, try turning the nosecone to see if that makes the mass offset go away, or if it's bad, put in some weight along the high side to balance it out.

That's a good lookin min dia. Do you mind me asking how much your radio tracker is? And how thick are your fins? Best of luck on your flights.
-Tom

Now that I look at the picture again the fins do seem small but they are bigger than they look I think the casing covering the fin a little is decieving. However they are pretty small but the cp cg is good I think the casing being so long helps. As far as centering the mass I have not checked this but without having the rocket in front of me I would guess would be fairly close the altimeter is just slightly off center and the battery is on the back side of that then the tracker is pretty much self centering because of its size it just fits. I can turn the tracker to correct this if there is a problem. Thanks for the advice.

Tom, are you asking the cost? 100 bucks for the transmitter and the receiver was 350 ish the fins are a little under .06 I don't remember off hand what the exact number was. The fins are very stiff prob overkill for a 24mm. I am building a 29mm version of this rocket for h motors and I used 32nd g10 with two very very thin fiberglass layers t2t using 1/3 2/3 method that looking back I wish I would have used on this rocket.

maxvelocity said:

Tom, are you asking the cost? 100 bucks for the transmitter and the receiver was 350 ish the fins are a little under .06 I don't remember off hand what the exact number was. The fins are very stiff prob overkill for a 24mm. I am building a 29mm version of this rocket for h motors and I used 32nd g10 with two very very thin fiberglass layers t2t using 1/3 2/3 method that looking back I wish I would have used on this rocket.

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Yes, I was asking about cost. And it still looks good. You should be golden.

Looks awesome. Are you deploying everything aft instead of forward?

No it breaks about 3/4 inch above the end of the motor. Only the chute and shock cord deploy. the short piece of coupler that makes up my av bay bolts into the upper airframe and serves as a shock cord anchor. Everything above stays in.

Any flights on this rocket yet?

No still haven't been able to fly it. Everytime I get ready to a launch is cancelled or something comes up. I think January it will fly if the club has a launch. i will update when it goes.

Oh okay, I was just checking. Cant wait to hear about a flight report!
-Tom

How did you fit the CSI tracker in the body tube? Looks like the black plastic piece connected to the circuit board needs to be trimmed. Is this what you did? I'm flying a trimmed down BH24 on a G107 dual thrust in a couple of weeks and need to be able to track it.