How do people even find these threads to necro?
My first rocket was a Wizard about 1983ish. Didn't have enough money for a launch set up, so I cobbled together a launch pad from wood salvaged from a shipping pallet found behind the local grocery store and cut/finished in my grandfather's wood shop. Blast deflector was a piece of metal cut from a scrap of aluminum siding. Used allowance money to buy a brass rod to serve as a launch rod. Salvaged a plastic case, 9V battery connector, and rotary power switch from a dead transistor radio. Used allowance money to buy a pair of alligator clips and a spool of wire from Radio Shack and made my launch controller out of the spare radio parts (first attempt at soldering!). Was gifted some motors.....launched at the local park a block from the house! Somewhere I still have that first launch pad!
Brass rods!
Aluminum siding! "Luxury! Sheer Luxury!"
First rocket was an Estes WAC Corporal, sometime shortly before the American Bicentennial. Built with Elmer's white glue and a single-edged razor blade, on the round Formica covered kitchen table. Couldn't get the fins to stand up while the glue dried, until it occurred to me to put wooden toothpicks into the runny "fillets" at the root. Multi-colored "cocktail" toothpicks filched from the pantry closet, and which became permanent parts of the rocket. Never got around to painting it.
First launch controller was a 6 volt lantern battery (taken out of a flashlight), a (possibly) 10 foot extension cord with the plug-end and receptacle-end cut off. Later, I used those pieces to make a "safety key", for the 2.0 version of the controller. Alligator clips for the igniter ... think I got them from Radio Shack one day when my dad stopped in to get our Battery Club card punched. It was tricky soldering the too-small clips onto the stranded AC wire with plumbing solder and a wood burning pen. No clips for the battery end. No switch. Just one lead wrapped around the spring terminal on the battery, and the other end dangling free until ignition. Lock-out was a rock holding down the free lead while the rocket was being racked.
First launch pad was a piece of wood from that wood burning kit (say the words "wood burning kit" to a kid from Generation Snapchat), about 8 inches long by 6 inches wide. Just the wood, no "blast deflector". When that wood burned through -- after maybe the first three flights -- I made a blast shield out of the cut-off top of a Contadina tomato paste can.
First launch rod was a wire coat hanger, made almost straight enough with a pair of already ancient Utica Drop Forge slip-joint pliers (known in my household as "the pliers"). The rod was secured by sticking it through a hole in the board (launch pad) and into the schoolyard sod.
I got a Port-a-Pad and an Astron Launch Control System for my next birthday. I quickly lost the saftey key. My brother, I think, fabricated the replacement from a wood screw bent into the shape of a crank-handle and with the head hack-sawed off. I have a vivid haptic memory of the threads against my fingers as I pushed the just-too-large shaft of the screw into the hole on the controller. Gave myself a stunning shock once, while attaching the battery clips to what I thought were the right places under the hood of my brother's Barracuda when we were launching my second or third rocket (an Astron Scrambler)
Switched to rocketry fuse when I was judged to be old enough to be trusted with matches. Or, more likely, when my parents got rid of the flashlight from which I stole 6V batteries. I don't think they ever
trusted me with matches, nor should they have done.
