RocketMike
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2012
- Messages
- 276
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- 14
I did a flight test of a rocket of "pretty much" my own design today. I say "pretty much" because it was made from parts of an old Estes kit that the original body tube had gotten crushed on. The motor mount and Nose cone are stock but I modified the fins somewhat and used an 18 inch long body tube I got from Semroc to come up with my own generic 4FNC design. I plugged the thing in Open Rocket to test for stability and also did an swing test on it. Today was the first test flight with an A8-3 which I figured would be underpowered but I have to be careful because I'm using a pretty small launch area. Anyway the rocket flew straight and true but did not gain enough altitude to even let the chute get ejected and open before it hit the ground. I'm guessing it maybe got 150 feet of altitude, if that. The thing is that the motor was really old.....I mean like year and years. I was probably risking a CATO even trying it but I had it on hand so I threw caution to the wind and gave it a shot. The motor performed properly but I'm trying to decide if the lack of altitude was because of my first thought which is that the bird was woefully underpowered or if the age of the motor might have caused it to lose some thrust. Trying to gauge what I should be using in this bird and not sure if what I saw today was a representative sample of "A power". Thoughts?
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