Here is when things went less than ideal, I have attached the launch video, but you can see it did a little spiral while the motor was burning. However, recovery all performed nominally, and it reached an apogee of 2970ft (or 2971/2969) if you ask the other two computers I flew (AV bay included two stratologgers, one custom for datalogging and tracking, one RF beacon for tracking).
View attachment IMG_8279 (1).MOV
The rocket was easy to track as I had data transmission the entire time and had my handheld directional beacon tracking setup which I used to lead me directly to the rocket:
Recovery was a success, however my drogue chute was slightly oversized and the winds this day were about 20mph on the ground, but over 70mph at 3000ft. The rocket landed around 2500ft away from the launch rail.
After looking at the rocket to try to figure out why it spun, I first thought somehow I might have misaligned the fins, but they were all straight as an arrow and 90 degrees apart. Then I looked at the motor mount tube, and sure enough, it wasn't straight
. I think the step above where I mentioned I did this in the wrong order is to blame as I should have put the rear centering ring on while I did the external fillets. It was pretty clearly not straight and I am not confident in this section's ability to handle the M1780 I have for my certification flight.
My next steps are probably going to be to remake the fin section with the upper body tube, and make a new upper body tube to replace that one (probably a shorter body tube, this rocket doesn't need to be as long as it is). I will still be shooting for a launch on February 24th at MDARS, but I may need to push that to the March launch date if I am not ready in time.