well...that was interesting. Ever had one of those launch attempts where before long you should be thinking "The rocket gods are trying to tell me something"? I spent some time in the garage hooking up 4 A8-3 engines to my home made cluster harness. My girls were outside playing in the snow, so I figured it was as good of a time as any to give it a shot. We carried everything out back, I connected the harness to the launch control wire, and we attempted to launch the saucer. First count down, nothing. I told my daughter to count down again, but this time to hold the button down...5, 4, 3, 2, 1...one of the four engines fires, the saucer didn't even make it off the rod as the other engines are still connected to the harness. OK, my paired lantern batteries obviously don't have enough juice to fire four, at least not in the cold. I should have given up then and there. But when I take the saucer back to the garage I see the spool sitting there. It took no time at all to load it up with a B4-2 and take it out to the pad.
Now that was a beautiful flight. Especially considering the thing took me all of 5 minutes to "build". With that confidence boost, I decide to try a little something different with the saucer. Instead of 4 18 mm, I put together 2 spent 18 mm (for spacing) and one C11.
I take it out to the pad, and have my daughter hook it up. Let this be a lesson, when it's cold outside, you should really double check everything...as it turns out my daughter didn't think to remove the safety cap from the launch rod. And as I was looking through the camera, I didn't notice it. Fortunately, well really unfortunately, that never became an issue. My daughter counted down, and pressed the fire button. This time the saucer smoothly rose into the air...taking the launch rod with it (yet another reason for those minimum distances while launching). Now I had tested that thing during the build to make certain it slid freely up and down the launch rod. And even made sure it slid down smoothly when I was setting it up. I guess the cold made the rod sit pretty loose in its seat which looks like the majority of the problem. Next time I'm using my other pad that I can tighten up more. And I plan to double check the saucer to see what I can do to it to keep this from happening in the future. First glance, the tape I used to hold the engines in place may have folded over or wrinkled up causing a bit more friction. I think it'll be easy to fix for next time.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, it looked like a decent flight.
[YOUTUBE]hvOv8EP9MBw[/YOUTUBE]
