The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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kcobbva

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Se we had a Good, Bad, and Ugly set of events today at the NOVAAR club flight. It was a great day and lots of kids out launching which is always great to see.

The Good
My daughter got to fly her Madcow Momba “Eat Mor Chikin” on a F40-6 and it was a really beautiful flight. I was very proud of her and she wore a really big smile. We also used a chute release due to the wind and it worked flawlessly. Just can’t beat that!!
megans momba.jpg

The Bad
I incorrectly set the camera on my Madcow Torrent and failed to get a capture of the flight today. First time this camera had been used since loosing one 808 this summer and just forgot how to operate the darned thing. The flight went very well and was my first experience with a DMS motor. Did the Tape routine Aerotech recommended and it worked great. At least my daughter got to see the Level 1 go up. She wasn't with me when I did my L1 and L2 certs, so it was nice for her to see the Torrent.
M Torrent.jpg

The Ugly
Finally got to launch my customized Mega Der Red Max; the Black Max on a G76-6. Everything looked great. Countdown and ignition was cool and about 40 foot up, it suddenly shot all the power up through the body, not the cone and came straight down. I’d never seen that happen. The body got so hot the wall started to cave in. Upon recovery, I found the internal layer of wrap was charred. The Kevlar strap I used was charred and partially shredded.
inside and frayed kevlar.jpgblackmax body.jpg
When I removed the motor, the burnout had basically removed the entire delay element. There was only a faint white layer around the inside edge of the forward closure. Looks like it wasn’t even there. Even the larger 0 ring was gone. The end hole was burned up as well.
end.jpgfwd closure.jpg
I’ve just never seen this happen before. I think if I can remove the outer layer of wrap I can put a coupler inside the body tube and resurrect it. I happened to walk over to talk with Ken (Performance Rocketry) as I was curious if he’d ever seen or heard of this happening. He took one look at it, gave me a new forward closure and said it’s a warrantied item. Heck I was just curious if he’d seen that. He’s a great guy.

In the end, it just gives me something more to work on and hopefully we’ll be able to recover from it. I am really proud of this one with the awesome Stickershock decals. I hate to see those get trashed, so I’m really hoping using an internal coupler can resolve the issue. Anyway that’s the ugly.
All in all it was an AWESOME day getting to see my girl launch her first midpower rocket with such success. I also got to see KSWING fly his very nice Binder Design Excel. Well done Ken, it was a great flight.

Finally for dinner tonight my daughter said she wanted to take her rocket out for dinner, so we did just that!
cf dinner.jpg
 

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Taking the rocket to dinner after a great flight is awesome! Congrats.
 
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