Rest in Pieces - post the rockets you once loved that died tragically

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Did you build another one?


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An honorable end for a fun rocket that suffered catastrophic motor mount failure.

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Not exactly a Rest in Pieces story, but I had to clean out my "rocket" garage today as we had a major leak in the roof. Ruined a lot of tubes, and two very large rockets. lesson learned, don't keep things directly on the floor.

From this:
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to this:


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Took them to our local recycling / dump and I had to assure the guy working there that the rockets were inert and wouldn't blow up if I put them in the dumpster.
 
So we are posting "All Dead...or MOSTLY Dead"....
The Rabid Weasel (Blue Tube 2.0 Weasel MD clone) Before...
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After....
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Eventually the fincan will be rebuilt, I59WN Cato at 30' altitude.
This one has since been rebuilt, and now I have another I59WN and hardware to feed it again....
 
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Lowtech: bt55, balsa nose cone and fins, 24mm mmt. Lost on a econojet F44w-8, est 1950'. This was my 2nd MPR I built after becoming a BAR.
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Lowtech 2: bt60, basswood fins, 24mm mmt. Lost on a F39-9t with a JLCR and JL3 on board, est 1500'.IMG_20180609_231455437.jpg
Lowtech 3: (right hand side) bt60, balsa fins, 29mm mmt. Dual failure 2 stage attempt on frozen lake, resulting in a ice pick and total loss of the rocket, rrc3, t3 gps, 808cam, couple lipos, etc. Failed to stage, AT G79w - AT G40w, and failed ejection charge, est 2000'.IMG_20180507_085605286.jpg lowtech 1 1/2: (second on the left) bt55, basswood fins, 24mm mmt. Lost on 3rd flight AT F63r, est 1850'.
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Lowtech 5: fresh build of the previous lost/broken but not forgotten rocket series. Bt60, large payload, 29mm mmt, basswood fins.
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Lowtech 4: final rocket in my Lowtech series. bt55, with or without payload tube, optional booster for 2 stage attempt, 29mm mmt, basswood fins based on maxQ design.

Lowtech and the series has been a spoof on the Loc Hitech.

~John
 
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Not exactly a Rest in Pieces story, but I had to clean out my "rocket" garage today as we had a major leak in the roof. Ruined a lot of tubes, and two very large rockets. lesson learned, don't keep things directly on the floor.

From this:
View attachment 422152 View attachment 422153


to this:


View attachment 422146

Took them to our local recycling / dump and I had to assure the guy working there that the rockets were inert and wouldn't blow up if I put them in the dumpster.
YIKES!!!
 
Several years ago My son built a Viper IV by Loc Precision. Flew it a few times at Bong in Wisconsin when I did my LVL 1 Certification. Year or two later we were at my friend Joes (R.I.P.) house flying on 10 acres. Did not want the same attitude with only 10 acres to work with......so we plugged two symmetric motor mounts and lit off the two Estes D12-3s. As best we can figure...…. One motor came up to pressure many milliseconds or maybe a full second after
the first...… Any way, it left the rail with Asymmetric thrust..... and not quite enough I might add. Arced over rather quickly at about 60-80 feet and drove into the ground almost horizontal, in the nearby pasture under full power.
Viper IV - Wisconsin Flight.jpg100_7584.jpg

100_7582.jpg Felt pretty bad for him...……. Found another Kit for him like the next Christmas
 
Don't have any pictures, but I built a LOC 4-29SS and had flown it several times on a pair of F50(ish) somethings a couple of times then tried G80's and zippered the upper tube. So used the opportunity to chop it in half and add in a AV bay... Ooh, opportunity to go higher... So I stuck in 4 AT G75M's and in all the excitement, making sure all the lighters were wired properly, I forgot to arm the altimeter... DOH... Adding to the insult of remembering that I DIDN'T arm the electronics right as Wildman launched the rocket, only one (maybe two on the same side) lit and the rocket got to about 50' up and headed south light a bat outa hell... Never to be seen again; until Tim gave me the remains next spring. It was still recognizable as being painted blue, but that's about it. :(:(
I didn't build another one, but, I did buy one already built from the forum here. But got interested in other things, like a bigger cluster rocket from the same fella. That hasn't gone totally well either. Gotta turn my cluster luck around.
 
Here's my all-time worst rocketry moment, in terms of both money/time/sentimental value, and in terms of the chain of stupid decisions that led up to it: my 3" scratchbuild "Derecho."

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First flight was my Level 1. In hindsight it was a ballsy certification flight, using drogueless dual-deploy with a Raven 2 in one of the Featherweight Altimeters 29mm avbay kits and a Cable Cutter. But it went pretty much perfectly, except for one minor issue: the altimeter module was difficult to keep aligned with the magnet switch pointed at the outside of the airframe and powering it up proved awkward and difficult.
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Yes, a 29mm avbay kit in a 3" rocket: the idea was to have a modular avionics bay where self-contained altimeter and battery units could just be "dropped in" to tubes in the main avionics bay, allowing altimeters to be swapped between rockets by tightening a single screw. So, for the second flight, I decided to "improve" the design by replacing the avbay kit with a homemade mini-avbay using a screw switch and a terminal block on the top to make wiring the charges up easier.

Long story short, the "Improved" (and not ground tested) avbay did not work. The rocket was designed to be capable of flying with a backup altimeter, but no backup altimeter module of any time was built or installed. Motor ejection as a backup was not physically possible due to the design of the shock cord mount providing no path for ejection gases, and the ejection charge was removed from the Pro38 motor. The result was a ballistic recovery from around 3,000 ft.

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The LOC airframe tubing was completely destroyed, with the only intact portions being the fin can and the part that was epoxied to the Blue Tube coupler. Between the coupler and the fin can the lower airframe was torn in half, and one fin was cracked. The nose cone was a LOC plastic one with the shoulder cut off and replaced with an airframe coupler to create the nose cone mounted avionics bay. The front 8" or so of the nose cone were embedded in the ground - at the same launch site where I had a 2 lb mailing tube rocket try to core sample said ground from ~1000 ft with a completely stripped chute and FAIL to damage either the ground or its airframe tube. The back of the nose cone was split open and the entire coupler was forced inside it, along with a little bit of the front of the airframe. This, uhh, reduced the diameter of the avionics bay.

Nose Cone Before:
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Nose Cone After:
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Note the unburned e-match and small pile of unburned loose black powder sitting on the bulkhead. The charge well containing these broke loose from the bulkhead but must have stayed mostly in place since the charge isn't scattered everywhere: I presumably removed it from the wreckage to check if the e-match burned or not.

Altimeter after being removed from the remnants of the avionics bay. The failure was most likely caused by my wiring and soldering. I'm guessing it was between the battery and the altimeter, since the e-match in the cable cutter didn't go off either, but there's no way of knowing for certain.
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End result? Total loss. The only salvagable components were the recovery system and a couple other minor bits of hardware like rail buttons, nuts, screws, and aluminum charge wells.

The rebuild was mostly complete, but then I graduated from college and didn't have access to a workspace, so it got shelved for a few years. Still needs painting/finishing and to have the avionics bay rebuilt again to actually fix the problems with the design.
 
Like Adrian, I don't have pictures.

Before the sod farm on Houser's Mill was lost as a field, was out with TARA at one of our monthly launches. Put an H100 in my L'il Nuke. Didn't see it for a couple of months, when I found pieces of it by one of the barns.
 
No picture, but I had an EnerJet Nike Ram I had built ~1971 or so. It flew great on F67-14's.
A few years ago I lost it when I tried to fly it on an AT F-25.
Woosh ...... gone :(
 
Public Missiles Bull Puppy. Post crash noodling made me realize that if you don't pull the piston on piston ejection systems after a few launches and clean out the crud, they will bind in the tube. Ejection charge blew out the nozzle and the rocket became a missile, a beautiful parabolic flight into the corn field. The nose cone was buried to the shoulder (the dirt on the NC from the family farm I grew up on), the fin can destroyed and the phenolic airframe disintegrated - I didn't even see small pieces. I made a memorial stand for it as a reminder to think before I launch...20200628_155154.jpg
 
Streamer or Parachute, streamer or parachute - Wrong Choice on the scratch built Moon Shot I. Wreckage on left is from same day, lugs stuck on rail & killed the Pup
 

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Lost my Public Enemy Honest John a few weeks ago on an L2 attempt. Flew on a J435 and the motor failed to ignite the ejection. It was scary coming down because we didn’t know where it was coming down. All we heard was the sound of a bomb being dropped. Pulled the motor out at home and the DMS casing had a large rip in the side. Trying to find the parts to rebuild it. Sent Aerotech an email bout it but they didn’t have any interest.
The loss of your Public Enemy Honest John hurts me nearly as much as you. Hate to see one of these birds lost. I see elsewhere that you're searching for a replacement.

If you fail to find one, I am a fan of the SBR Hojo, and also the Madcow 2.6" Honest John. Maybe try one of those.
 
My beloved Mac-Performance Scorpion was lost due to me not putting a tracker in it. If I simply put the tracker in it I wold have walked right up to it as it lay in the tall rye grass. My wife and I looked for hours. The farmer "found it" with his planter. We had given the farmer a heads up that it was out there. Thank God he is a cool guy and was not mad at all. He left it in our launch field "porta-Jon". The rocket went from the glories of flight to the floor of a toilet. So sad....

Unbelievably, the chute survived without a tear! All I did was wash it and it was good to go. The only thing remaining was the altimeter sled with bulk-heads and tail cone. Even the dual RRC2 minis were toast from all the dirt that filled the bay.

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Oh man, where do I even begin? I wish I had pictures.

My level 1 cert rocket (PML X-Calibur) was lost (some time after the successful cert flight) when I was rushing an H123W motor assembly and dumped the ejection charge powder into the well without making sure I poked some down into contact with the delay element. It came in ballistic and I couldn't find it. The kind farmer, thankfully, found it some months later and the Quad-Cities rocket club folks shipped the nose, motor case, and recovery laundry back to me in good shape. The body tube was Quantum Tube and presumably completely shattered.

Due to field conditions (tall grass) I borrowed a buzzer from a friend to aid in the finding of my LOC Lil' Nuke, but the buzzer was somewhat heavy and I didn't use a bigger motor or a shorter delay to compensate. Nose dive into the field under delay and wrecked.

My first HPR scratch build was destroyed in a spectactular mid-air RUD at Midwest Power 10 in 2012 under thrust when I tried to fly it on a K540M. The rocket started oscillating as soon as it left the rail and it violently shook itself apart a second later. There are several reasons this could have happened I thought of in the postmortem:
-Per simulation, the speed was approaching transonic and there would have been significant drag on one side due to a large epoxy glob where the 1/2" launch lug used to be before I switched to rail buttons in frustration after the lugs kept popping off. This asymmetrical drag could have caused the oscillation with the fins trying to correct it.
-I had 1.0-something calibers of stability using the K motor. This may not have been enough on a 9' long, 4" diameter rocket.
The rocket was almost completely destroyed, but I recovered and still have most of the pieces. The motor case, recovery laundry, nose, and fins are all still good and being recycled into a future build called the "Phoenix."

My second HPR scratch build (which was built before the first was wrecked) was lost when I was trying a Raven 3 altimeter for the first time (after my previous altimeter was wrecked in the aforementioned midair RUD). My guess is that I didn't do a good enough job soldering the battery connection, because it lost power on the way down between when it deployed the drogue and when it was supposed to deploy the main, so the main never came out. The altimeter was still good though and went on to several successful flights. The fins, nose, recovery laundry, and a section of body tube were recycled from that rocket into the "Lazarus," Which I just finished this year and unfortunately haven't flown yet due to coronavirus shutting down MDRA.

I've also lost too many low power rockets at this point to count to trees, poor motor selection, too-tight noses, hard landings on concrete, and all the other issues that plague little rockets.

The only thing I can say I've dodged is that I have never once had a motor CATO.
 
My "got to" rocket was a 4" Mad Dog rocket from Performance Rocketry flying on a CTI L640 Dual Thrust Motor. Its final flight was at LDRS in 2015. Just after liftoff, things went quickly south -- the forward closure let loose. The flight ended with one of the pad managers unceremoniously kicking dirt on it to douse the flames.

My favorite rocket
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Some of you probably remember my SUMO. The first flight was my L1 flight and I drag raced my friend with his G-FORCE for his L1 flight. It was awesome! The second flight with the same motor the rocket failed to blow out the laundry coming in ballistic. It buried itself in the desert playa from about 3500 feet. I had to dig it out and the motor ejected out the rear. My friend said it was because I used a ESTES plastic retainer, well not sure that's what happened? Then I remember reading an article on here, that if you fly this kit without a piston you may have similar issues with getting the laundry out? Well currently I'm building another one as I write this, but this took place 4-5 years ago. Hard to believe its been that long since I have flown any rockets, but life gets in the way along with many other obligations as is the case with me. Still undecided on the paint scheme for the new one. I might go stock with upgraded decals from Mark? Not sure yet?
 

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Lost my SLA 3d printed Falcon 9 yesterday. Chute was too tight and the ejection charge blew it to pieces.
 

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Lost both my LOC Minie-Magg and my PML Striker on July 11th.
I had build the Striker first for my HPR L1 and the Minie-Magg as a secondary and possible L2.

The Minie-Magg was launched first as my L1 flight. Launched great but the delay was too long. It noseplanted into a small pond and blew the charge. Nosecone was lost in the mud, the rest was recovered though I may be able to repair the body tube.

Since I had it on hand I decided to go ahead and fly the Striker as a second attempt. Launch was fine, chute deployed and then I walked up on it and realized that the piston had sealed in the center tube so the charge blew out the entire center core. Total loss.

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I need to start naming all my rockets "Shorter", because that's how they end up.

I'm not *EVEN* going to post my last launch. We lost sight of it on the way up, no ejection for some reason, then I heard a whistle...THUMP. It landed about 15 feet from the pad (on the other side). Buried half the nosecone, and shattered 2/3 of the length of the 54mm PML phenolic body tube. Yet - it's rebuildable!

Then there's the time Larry made the runway bleed...

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Modified 3" LOC Iris cert 2 rocket. The K675 shredded it at Max Q.

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These are the only parts recovered. Thankfully, all the electronics were inside and still functioning.
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The airframe was double-walled with couplers, too.
 
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Well, I might as well update this thread. Yes, Eric Cayemberg, I killed another LOC Goblin. Last fall actually. I like flying the rocket on AT 54/426 motors. Used a I229T. In my hurry to prep the rocket, I didn’t contain the ejection charge as tightly as I usually do.
And the result…7087DB67-360D-41FB-8945-50DFA95BC0FB.jpeg
So, I’m on Goblin #3…
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Yet to be flown. Bread not included…😁
 
I had a very nice Squirrelworks Arapahoe-E that I built. Flew it several times on up to D engines, put in an E engine, and it pinwheeled around the sky, aimed itself at the ground and impacted while still under power. Irritating this was that the package had specifically recommended that particular E engine. I looked at the cost of a replacement kit, and the price had gone up significantly, plus all that balsa work was a pain to make really pretty. So I haven't replaced it, though I may do a clone of it with cut down plastic nosecones instead of pricier and harder to work with balsa.

Before crash:
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After crash:
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