Let's See Your Lawndarts... (Or Tell Us Your Tale(s) Of Lawndarts.)

[K'Tesh]

This is not intended for encouraging people to have them... Just to see the aftermath of when a flight goes wrong...

Personally, I've had two, both were two stage kits where the upper stage failed to ignite, I have no idea why either failed, other than I didn't have any kind of pressure relief between the motors, but that wasn't called for in the instructions as the motors were directly stacked on each other. The first was an Estes Magnum, the second was an Estes Warp II. Both occurred in the 1990s, and I didn't have a camera to record the remains.

I've also witnessed two others...

One was an Estes Space Shuttle that rolled as it was on the boost, then glided into the ground before the ejection charge fired. This had the effect of blowing the motor mount out the back of the rocket. I'm guessing the cause was that the guys loaded a more powerful motor than it was intended for (perhaps a C6-7) , OR that they weren't careful enough with the angle of the flaps...

The scariest was when one of my classmates glued his nosecone into the rocket deliberately during a school launch. It impacted between the feet of another one of our classmates when he didn't hear the rest of us yelling at him to look out until the last moment, and fell backwards just before he could have been impaled by it.

 

[Zeus-cat]

Estes sidewinder. I think this is the 24mm motor mount. The chute didn't eject, but the nose separated. It flew again, but has since crashed and was mortally wounded.

 

[user 35280]

 

[Zeus-cat]

Not really a lawn dart, but this happened years ago and deserves to be shared again. The lower bulkhead on the av bay blew apart (the plywood bulkhead was too thin in my opinion). The lower half landed on the drogue and suffered no further damage. The upper section impaled itself on a corn stalk as it came in flat.

 

[DigBaddy]

In April. My 30yo Alien Space Probe. Lawn darted on a C6-5. (maybe a bit long of a delay, but it has flown tons of times on those motors) This was after being repaired from a January lawn dart into our frozen lake also on a C6-5 from the same bulk pack. The same day as that picture, my son's Firestorm did the same thing on, guess it, a C6-5 from the same pack. The two motors from that day were torched on the outside. Ejection charges were not right and/or they flamed out the front. Estes sent a new pack and some body tubes to fix things up.

 

[mo2872]

Biiiiiiiiig Daddy……

 

[MClark]

This is the 10 foot tall booster.

 

[MALBAR 70]

Road Dart

 

[Troy3003]

Happened a few weeks ago. I was using motor eject only and it failed to burn, powder is still under the paper. Buried down to coupler.

 

[CPA - not an Engineer]

ASP Tall Boy - top 3 sections separated just fine. But the chute didn’t eject from the booster section resulting in a nosecone-less dart.

Shortened the booster and tried again with the same result. Will need to figure out a way to attach the booster chute to the top section, to guarantee that the chute ejects.

 

[MALBAR 70]

ASP Tall Boy - top 3 sections separated just fine. But the chute didn’t eject from the booster section resulting in a nosecone-less dart.

Shortened the booster and tried again with the same result. Will need to figure out a way to attach the booster chute to the top section, to guarantee that the chute ejects.

I usually pack the chute for the upper section below the chute for the booster section. That way when the top section is ejected, it pulls out the parachute for the booster.

 

[ghostfather]

When I had been flying about a year, I was still level 1, and attended a launch in Switzerland. I had a rocket that had flown several times, which used motor ejection and a piston to push out the chute. For some reason, the piston seized, and it came in ballistic.

I still have the shovel my mates bought me in Switzerland after burying the nose cone pretty deep.

 

[DeeRoc29]

O5000 EX

 

[Nathan]

My scratch built Mega Der Red Max clone. It was a victim of the CTI 38mm VMax no-ejection-charge problem. This proves that Blue Tube is not indestructible.

 

[Troy3003]

My scratch built Mega Der Red Max clone. It was a victim of the CTI 38mm VMax no-ejection-charge problem. This proves that Blue Tube is not indestructible.View attachment 469667

Mine in the post above was a CTI 38mm no eject also, although it wasn't a vmax

 

[CoyoteNumber2]

Despite a ruined nosecone and electronics, the rocket was otherwise fine and flew again.

 

[Donnager]

54mm Mach 1 (originally about 72") on an H-550.

Arced over and puffed smoke, but rocket didn't separate. Landed in the sod, turning the 1/4" all thread in the nose into a pretzel. Shortened the whole works by about half.

I was carrying back the telescoped rocket, and got stopped by a college student doing his level 1. He said sorry, that sucks but it looks kind of cool. Can I take a picture?"

8 months later, the rocket redeemed itself and flew the same motor again with no issues.

I should have taken pictures of the necropsy, or at least the forensic reconstruction.

 

[Gerald]

Too long of a delay for low altitude it obtained. Fixed up with different engine and now is one of my best flyers !

 

[mo2872]

Mean Machine that my then 14 year old built(last summer).......little too much tape on the nosecone shoulder........OOOPS!!!

 

[DaHabes]

PML Bull Puppy. The piston wasn't cleaned and bound in the tube. The nozzle blew out of the motor and the parachute never deployed. The phenolic tube literally shattered into a million pieces.

This is all that was left.



The memorial...

 

[crossfire]

Happened a few weeks ago. I was using motor eject only and it failed to burn, powder is still under the paper. Buried down to coupler.View attachment 469626View attachment 469627View attachment 469628

What motor was it. Was BP below the disk or did it get sucked out through the nozzle?

 

[afadeev]

ex-Nike-Hercules RoackWerks 18mm cluster kit:



All four Estes motors lit just fine of the pad just fine.
All four ejection charges fired.
Evidently, not at once, and with an insufficient force to eject the nose cone and the laundry.

a

 

[Troy3003]

What motor was it. Was BP below the disk or did it get sucked out through the nozzle?

i180 skidmark. It feels like there is still powder under the disk. Didn't remove yet, kinda tossed it on the shelf and forgot about it.

 

[crossfire]

i180 skidmark. It feels like there is still powder under the disk. Didn't remove yet, kinda tossed it on the shelf and forgot about it.

Check it out.

 

[Swany]

Here’s what my Blackhawk looked like after flying on a J340 a couple weeks ago. It looks like the drogue charge igniter fired, but didn’t light the powder. The main charge fired but not enough to overcome the dynamic pressure of coming in ballistic. It did however pop the nosecone off so that it was torn loose from the shock chord on impact. I found it laying about 30 feet away with my GPS tracker still functioning .

 

[BEC]

Since I manage to fly a lot, I've had quite a few lawn darts. Major causes are failure to deploy the chute on a very stable model (Big Bertha, for example), shock cord failure resulting in a lawn dart of the body (the Alpha is good at this) and failure for the upper stage to light on a two-stager. Last February 9th I had three in one day. The Checkmate was a failure to fully deploy, I think. The Big Bertha was a blown-out motor mount and so incomplete deployment of the 'chute, and the Tazz was, well, that's just the way the Tazz recovers. The Alpha was in December of 2019.


The Alpha above had a similar failure much more recently over a much harder surface. That was its last flight (#92).

Here is an earlier one of the Checkmate that is clearly a failure of second-stage ignition. As with the Alpha, this same failure over a much less forgiving surface did in this particular model:

 

[FredA]

Was an 8" diameter 1/2-scale CF Nike Smoke:

 

[Troy3003]

Check it out.

Yep still loaded.
View attachment 20210621_192408.mp4

 

[Blast it Tom!]

I can only describe my one and only lawn dart. I have done so on here before. It was a minimum of 53 years ago, which would make me 12. My very first rocket, an Estes 18 mm WAC Corporal. So, so careful, just everything as to-the-letter as I could. Except for my nice, tight-fitting nose cone. Dead calm evening, Dad and I at the at the same athletic field where I'm now taking my grandkids to see Pap-pap launch his rockets. So I have my little red Estes battery pack launcher with the 8 D batteries in it. Dramatic countdown. Straight up, beautiful launch! Annnnnddd.... Oh oh... straight down.... at first we didn't know which way to run, it seemed every way we moved it was coming straight at us! Finally just picked a direction and took off! It landed only about 10 ft. from the pad, and the ground was soft enough that it flew again after about 1/4" of body-tube shortening (and recutting those old slits in the body tube for the shock cord).

 

[BEC]

So I have my little red Estes battery pack launcher with the 8 D batteries in it.

Electro-Launch. There's one in my avatar picture, with the Alpha shown lawn-darted in my post above, sitting on it....

Don't need eight D cells when they're Duracells. Four work just fine.