I 've just been back as an NAR member for two weeks now. I just competed in my first NAR competition in Denver , CO on November 11, 2007 since I had last competed in NARAM 3 in 1961. Great fun. I got a renewed passion about rocketry since the NAR is celebrating their 50th anniversary.
For the last two weeks I was building rockets to enter 6 events at BRMM-III, and although they all got off the ground, I was only happy with 8 out of 11 flights. Clusters always haunted me when I was 14 as well. After one week of building the old school method, I visited a local member of C.R.A.S.H. (the Denver club) to see his stuff and then re-built them all over again. I'm definitely a rookie again so I can identify with you starting out from scratch This is what I learned yesterday.
Find someone to tag along with (as long as you don't get in their way). I showed up and waited for some sort of meeting (rules and procedures) but everyone just started putting their rockets on the available rods and started flying. There is no order in smaller regional meets, unless there is an altitude event which needs tracking station operators. If you can, register for the event or have your paper work filled out before you get there. It very simple, but you don't want to be doing that when you could be prepping rockets.
1) Go look at the competitors rockets as soon as you can before you start building.
2) Get white tubes from Apogee and fiberglass fins from ASP. Use mostly medium CA.
3) Build two rockets of everything. The hosting club will tell you in advance what classes they will be flying, and every meet will have similar, but different classes, so I suspect we are going to end up with a LOT of rockets by NARAM 50.
4) Since you are given two flights in every class (except for parachute spot landing) launching them close together in time sends you out looking for them twice. I shot two C streamer duration models up and then went to chase them. They both landed a half-mile away, but within 50 yards of each other. I'm 60, and although I like the forced exercise, I needed time to prep the other rockets. Plus the wind changed direction by 90 degrees within an hour so I would have doubled my walking distance.
5) make sure your rockets stay together and that they can be seen. Use a light coat of Florescant paint and black somewhere. Visability is more important than altitude or duration right now. At this point you need to build points by having all your flights qualified, and if they can't see them at altitude or off in the distance in duration or if you can't find the beast to bring back you're DQ'd (disqualified).
6) don't try to stuff too much parachute or streamer in your rocket (for duration events) until you get a feel for what works. If they don't unfold its worse than having smaller versions. I had a 7x70" .5 mil streamer folded lengthwise into an 18mm tube which basically stayed folded at 3.5" so I lost the advantage of the increased surface area drag. If I had made the rocket 2" longer, I could have left it in a 7" roll. FYI- you're supposed to fan-fold these things nowadays.
7) make a large rocket, with a little motor for spot landing events. I had a really clean rocket that went up so far, the wind made it impossible to get it to come down close to the flag.
8) Make sure your expended motors stay in the rocket and you have a secondary tie down for your shock cord. I had two rockets where the kevlar cord burned through.
FYI - We saw two new NAR records at this meet by really ugly looking rockets that were visable both on the ground and in the sky.
Everybody else can chime in.
mike
