Hi all! <waves>
Soooo - I was 13 when Niel Armstrong took that historic 1st step. Had all the models, simulated every stage of the flight. 1st rocket - Estes WAC Corporal. Oh, so careful! Dad & I took it out one vary calm night, leveled the launch pad, and off she went! Perfect! Straight up! Annnd - no chute! And it's coming straight down, we didn't know which way to run! It lawn-darted 12 ft from the pad, but since the ground was soft it really didn't hurt it much. By the time I was out of high school I was designing my own using the moments and centroids method, put the CP 1.5 x the tube diameter behind the CG.
Grew up, married, 5 kids, worked like crazy, never had time to get back into it. Before I got married, I did grab a copy of "Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry" (1973, Mandel, Caporaso, and Bengen, MIT Press) which I still have. In his teens my oldest son thought we ought to give it a try and built a launch pad - which has been used, once. He put a C6-5 in a fairly light-weight rocket - it went straight up anddespite our best efforts we never saw it again! Don't want to go all "TLR" on you but now as the nearness of retirement brightens the horizon, well... one more story.
in honor of the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I'd built Famemaster's 1:100 Saturn V with the transparent display panels. When we would babysit one crop of the grandchildren, my 5 year old granddaughter was just fascinated with it- and so I began to explain to her what they had done and how, pictures on the computer, etc. I then found a more rugged toy version that could also simulate the entire mission, and on the anniversary, we watch the Apollo 11 movie with the new footage - and didn't that girl have to simulate every stage of the mission as it went with the toy I'd gotten for, well, all of them, but she really took a shine to it.
Over the years I somehow managed to become an engineer, mostly working on mechanical analysis of large motors and generators. We've done quite a bit that way with NASA, but the one I'm proudest of, I didn't participate in - my boss did the re-powering study to determine what was needed for the crawler to get the SLS up the hill to pads 39 A or B! He was down there crawling all over that crawler while I'm back here in Pittsburgh doing the slow burn...!
Anyway, as I wade ever so slowly back in, I am tickled by the advances in electronics and telemetry, electronic ejection control, all sorts of stuff that really "kicks it up a notch". Being from Western PA, we really don't have a lot of places to fly, and we also have plenty of rocket-eating trees (to borrow from Charlie Brown). So we have to be content with low altitude, mostly. I believe there's a group around here that hauls up to Grove City to launch, where there is a reasonable amount of open, flat ground.
But my, I have a lot of reading to do to "catch up". My oldest son & I recently bought kits - he a more generic Estes design, I opted for their larger Mercury-Redstone (grandkid educational angle again!). Sure enough, I quickly located a good on-line build and saw what i was up against. So I'll probably head over to the Scale section and start asking around. I was surprised when the instructions said to prime the body tube and sand until smooth! I wondered how I was going to get the tube spirals out, now I'm wondering what kind of sandable primer to use! Just that elementary, the olde guy is...!
Well, again, hi, all! Any good "1st rocket" stories, or whatever, perhaps we can reminisce together.. (Hmm. never thought to search fro a dedicated thread for that - moderators deal appropriately!)
Tom
Soooo - I was 13 when Niel Armstrong took that historic 1st step. Had all the models, simulated every stage of the flight. 1st rocket - Estes WAC Corporal. Oh, so careful! Dad & I took it out one vary calm night, leveled the launch pad, and off she went! Perfect! Straight up! Annnd - no chute! And it's coming straight down, we didn't know which way to run! It lawn-darted 12 ft from the pad, but since the ground was soft it really didn't hurt it much. By the time I was out of high school I was designing my own using the moments and centroids method, put the CP 1.5 x the tube diameter behind the CG.
Grew up, married, 5 kids, worked like crazy, never had time to get back into it. Before I got married, I did grab a copy of "Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry" (1973, Mandel, Caporaso, and Bengen, MIT Press) which I still have. In his teens my oldest son thought we ought to give it a try and built a launch pad - which has been used, once. He put a C6-5 in a fairly light-weight rocket - it went straight up anddespite our best efforts we never saw it again! Don't want to go all "TLR" on you but now as the nearness of retirement brightens the horizon, well... one more story.
in honor of the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I'd built Famemaster's 1:100 Saturn V with the transparent display panels. When we would babysit one crop of the grandchildren, my 5 year old granddaughter was just fascinated with it- and so I began to explain to her what they had done and how, pictures on the computer, etc. I then found a more rugged toy version that could also simulate the entire mission, and on the anniversary, we watch the Apollo 11 movie with the new footage - and didn't that girl have to simulate every stage of the mission as it went with the toy I'd gotten for, well, all of them, but she really took a shine to it.
Over the years I somehow managed to become an engineer, mostly working on mechanical analysis of large motors and generators. We've done quite a bit that way with NASA, but the one I'm proudest of, I didn't participate in - my boss did the re-powering study to determine what was needed for the crawler to get the SLS up the hill to pads 39 A or B! He was down there crawling all over that crawler while I'm back here in Pittsburgh doing the slow burn...!
Anyway, as I wade ever so slowly back in, I am tickled by the advances in electronics and telemetry, electronic ejection control, all sorts of stuff that really "kicks it up a notch". Being from Western PA, we really don't have a lot of places to fly, and we also have plenty of rocket-eating trees (to borrow from Charlie Brown). So we have to be content with low altitude, mostly. I believe there's a group around here that hauls up to Grove City to launch, where there is a reasonable amount of open, flat ground.
But my, I have a lot of reading to do to "catch up". My oldest son & I recently bought kits - he a more generic Estes design, I opted for their larger Mercury-Redstone (grandkid educational angle again!). Sure enough, I quickly located a good on-line build and saw what i was up against. So I'll probably head over to the Scale section and start asking around. I was surprised when the instructions said to prime the body tube and sand until smooth! I wondered how I was going to get the tube spirals out, now I'm wondering what kind of sandable primer to use! Just that elementary, the olde guy is...!
Well, again, hi, all! Any good "1st rocket" stories, or whatever, perhaps we can reminisce together.. (Hmm. never thought to search fro a dedicated thread for that - moderators deal appropriately!)
Tom