Rockets

S/N	Name	Power	Motor	Status	Flights	Incidents
1	Frank	Low	18 mm	Grounded	1	1
2	George	Low	18 mm	Damaged	6	1
3	George 2: Electric Boogaloo	Low	18 mm	Retired	1	1
4	Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For	Mid	29 mm	Ready	4	3
5	S. S. Learning Experience	High	38 mm	Ready	2	1

Frank

An Estes Bull Pup which I built, together with George, to get back into rocketry.

I bought a fin alignment jig from Estes, but found that it was pretty crap, and ended up freehanding the fin placement. It didn’t turn out too bad, but it also cemented in my brain that I must use a better jig in the future. I did notice while building Frank that there was no motor retention clip like I thought there should have been, but figured that the manufacturer must know best, so I went with it.

Launch	Date	Location	Motor	Goal	Outcome
1	2022-08-13	ROC Lucerne	Estes B6-4	Test flight	Failure, grounded

First (and only) flight was on 2022-08-13 at ROC Lucerne. Just after apogee, the ejection charge fired and ejected both the parachute out the front and the motor (which, evidently, did not have a good enough friction fit) out the rear of the craft. The parachute was not melted at all and carried the craft safely down, while the motor landed a mere 10 ft from where I was standing, close enough that I could hear it hit the playa. All wadding stayed in the craft.

Until a better form of motor retention can be retrofitted, Frank is grounded as a matter of safety. Since I don’t think that any such retention system would be easy to add, nor would the amount of labor involved be less than simply building a new one with said retention system, Frank should probably be considered retired.

George

Estes 1.6" Patriot kit; a great, known-stable platform. Built at the same time as Frank.

George has become my go-to, my trusty workhorse. It has seen some shit but has never had a less-than-stellar flight. Once it’s on the ground, though, things can go either way.

Launch	Date	Location	Motor	Goal	Outcome
1	2022-08-13	ROC Lucerne	Estes B6-4	Test flight	Success
2	2023-04-08	ROC Lucerne	Estes C6-5	n/a	Minor damage
3	2023-11-11	ROC Lucerne	Estes C6-5	Test modifications	Success
4	2023-11-11	ROC Lucerne	Estes C6-5	n/a	Success
5	2025-04-11	ROC Lucerne	Estes C6-5	n/a	Success
6	2025-04-12	ROC Lucerne	Estes B6-4	Test high-wind stability	Success, minor damage

First flight on 2022-08-13, right before Frank flew, and was flawless, with the most serene, peacefully arcing trajectory I could have asked for. I started it off on a B6, and wanted to immediately go up to a C6, but I had to rush out to th launch site right after a 48-hour shift, and only made it in time for the last round of flights.

The second flight was during the next spring’s ROC Stock (2023-04-08), with a C6, and resulted in a dent to the forward end of the body tube, which was likely sustained while being dragged by wind after landing. It was was easily popped back out and has not proven to be any kind of hindrance or issue since. This flight was recorded on video and was used to validate the OpenRocket simulation.

Later that year, on 2023-11-11, I slapped some battery-powered blinking LED clusters to the sides of George so that it could be flown at night, and made two more flights in pretty quick succession. The body tubed retained a surprising amount of heat despite the cold night air.

Flight five was on 2025-04-11, and the only note I took was “perfect flight as usual”. The next day, due to very high winds at the launch site, I dropped down to a B6 instead of the prior days C6, but George was still carried pretty far as it descended under parachute. Humorously enough, it was carried almost three times as far by the wind after it hit the ground than before, and sustained a good amount of damage to the forward body and fins. It is absolutely still flightworthy, but I do want to at least touch up the paint (primer, really) before it goes out again.

George 2: Electric Boogaloo

I accidentally ordered a second Patriot kit when I was building George, so I kept it and added a 3D-printed nose cone with a coat of bright orange paint, some rudimentary datalogging hardware and software, and a slightly larger parachute to offset the added mass of the computer.

Launch	Date	Location	Motor	Goal	Outcome
1	2023-04-08	ROC Lucerne	Estes C6-5	Test printed parts	Failure; significant damage

It flew on 2023-04-08, and everything looked fantastic up until the deployment charge fired. Right as I watched the nose cone go sailing off into the distance, now completely unattached to the aft body or parachute, I realized how closely the supposedly “high visibility” orange was to the brown of the desert floor. The body descended gracefully under the larger Apogee parachute and was easily recovered, but as the day went on and the ever-lowering sun cast more and more orange light onto the sand, I began to think I would never recover the nose and computer. Thankfully, as I was formulating a plan to use low-angle flashlights at night to try to locate the nose, I heard someone yelling for me from way out past the flight line. When the range opened, I made my way out there and found the nose, resting peacefully in a divot, in three parts: the base, which had been attached to the body tube; what I had termed the “backboard”, to which the computer was attached with a ziptie, which itself was still held to the bulk of nosecone with two screws, and a small section of the tip of the nose which seemed as if it had been simply cut off the front by someone seeking to demonstrate what a circular conic section looks like. Evidently, I had been far too ambitious in my infill percent choice when printing the nose cone, and the eyebolt had torn its supporting structure straight out of the base of the nose when the ejection charge fired. The infill in the backboard gave way next, followed by the very tip of the cone. I am not sure why the tip broke the way it did, though I have a suspicion that it is due to stress within the plastic itself rather than air pressure inside the nose. The onboard computer generated data all the way down, and was in perfectly reflyable condition when it was recovered.

George 2 has not been repaired. I do not have any plans to do so, as I consider the lessons to have been learned already, and any further experimentation would very nearly necessitate a larger-diameter craft.

Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For

A 2.6 " Patriot from LOC Precision. This one has become the focus of most of my experiments.

I wanted to get more experience with different construction techniques before moving up to a (relatively) expensive high-power rocket, and after noting how well George performed, I decided to just get a larger version of George. This was the first time I had used through-the-wall fins, and, not wanting to mess it up as badly as with Frank, I printed a jig to use for alignment. It worked very well. The eyebolt provided in the kit was made of a section of bent metal wire instead of being forged or welded, and even though I had heard from someone, somewhere, that this was Very Bad™, I figured that if they had included it in the kit, it mustn’t actually be that bad. To err on the side of caution, I epoxied and threadlocked the shit out of it and even wrapped the aftmost section of shock cord in a bit of heatshrink tubing to minimize the effect of any chafing. Additionally, I tried to add some homegrown nose weight system using a 3D-printed centering ring (with like 80% infill this time) and a length of threaded PVC with a screw-on cap. I’m still pretty proud of how this turned out, even if it was entirely the wrong solution to the problem of not having enough nose weight.

Launch	Date	Location	Motor	Goal	Outcome
1	2023-04-08	ROC Lucerne	Aerojet E30-4T	Test flight	Success
2	2023-04-08	ROC Lucerne	Aerojet E30-4T	n/a	Success
3	2023-10-11	ROC Lucerne	Aerojet F50-6	n/a	Significant damage
4	2024-11-09	ROC Lucerne	Aerojet F67-6W	Test repair	Failure; minor damage
5	2025-04-11	ROC Lucerne	Aerojet F67-6W	Test repair	Success

First flight was on 2023-04-08, and even though the parachute shock cord did get a little tangled upon deployment, it didn’t negatively affect anything. I was so stoked by how well things turned out that I almost immediately flew it again on the second E30 motor of the two-pack that I had purchased that morning. The second flight went even better than the first.

I got a little greedy. A few months later, I figured that things had gone so well with the first two flights that I could go for my L1. Instead of jumping from an E30 to an I-something, I figured that *not* quadrupling the impulse in one go was a pretty smart move, so I decided to just double it instead. On the morning of 2023-11-10, I slapped in an Aerojet F50, pressed send (well, the LCO pressed it), and watched from the flight line as the ejection charge completely straightened out the forward eyebolt and tore the nose cone clean off. Mercifully, the shock cord didn’t completely tangle and unwound juuust enough to absorb the force imparted by the ejection charge to prevent the rear eyebolt from also completely straightening out. In fact, the looped end shock cord connecting the parachute to the aft section of the rocket was actually holding on to the flat end of the almost-straightened rear eyebolt; had it moved even 5 mm more outwards during separation, both halves would have come down ballistically and the parachute would likely have been carried off into the sunset by the wind. As it was, only the nose made the transition from aerodynamics to geology, hitting with enough force to dislodge the epoxy used to keep the 3D-printed nose-weight centering ring in place. Reflight was absolutely not possible. Had there been a flight computer situated anywhere in the nose, it would likely not have survived impact.

Almost a year later, I got around to doing a repair. The forward body tube was ever so slightly deformed from the collision with the planet, but there was no measurable deflection to the tube itself and only some minor wrinkling (≤ 1 mm lateral to tube surface) at the cardboard wrap-seams, I judged it to be reflyable. The nose itself needed to be sanded smooth again, but that wasn’t difficult, just tedious. While I was there, I fixed up the nose weight system to be something much more in line with the “real” nose weight system on the S. S. Learning Experience, which had already seen one very successful flight by this point. The real issue was the rear eyebolt; it was too far in to the body to reach by hand, and due to how well I had epoxied it in place, it could not be removed by tools. I ended up cutting a square hole out of the side of the body tube with a knife, then going in with a Dremel and removing enough of the epoxy to allow me to unscrew what had become a “lowercase i bolt”. A new forged eyebolt was added, along with fresh threadlocker and epoxy, then a section of coupler tube was pushed down into the craft, glued in place, and the section of body tube that had been cut away to create the opening was glued back onto the new coupler section. Unfortunately, due to the amount of epoxy which had already been applied to the centering ring, the coupler tube was not flush with said ring, and the outer patch could not be entirely glued on. I knew this was probably not going to work and air was going to go through the opening to the aft of the patch, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the ejection charge of the very next flight (2024-11-09) blew the small, square body tube patch out into the desert, never to be seen again. I wanted to play things a little safe, but not too safe, so I only upped the motor impulse a little bit and flew on an Aerojet F67. There was enough ejection charge pressure to go around, as both the patch and parachute were enthusiastically expelled from the body.

Knowing that I probably shouldn’t count on being able to get away with that kind of repair twice, and really not wanting to have to cut and glue a new patch each time, I did my best to remove (read: “tear out”) the coupler tube from the aft of the body tube, and then cut a section of body tube along the long axis so as to open it up, then glued it over the opening in the hull with about 5 USD worth of superglue and held the patch job in place with zipties. This repair, I should note, took place in the field, on the morning of 2025-04-11. By that afternoon, the glue had dried and the RSO signed off on my work, so I gave Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For a flight worthy of its name, lofting it on another Aerotech F67. The patch job worked flawlessly, and I am confident that it will hold as long as I stick to mid-power motors.

S. S. Learning Experience

I just really like the Patriot, okay?

This is another kit from LOC Precision, but 4" in diameter, and I opted for the electronics bay and Nose Cone Weight System as well. The ebay is being used, but only separates at the aft end, with the forward coupler being attached to the forward body tube by several removable plastic rivets. I modified the nose weight system to use a stack of washers held to a forged eyebolt by any of a number of bolts. This way, the length of the bolt can be varied to accommodate as many washers as are needed to reach a target weight. This system works very well, and my local hardware store was quick to remark that I am the first person they have seen bring a scale so as to purchase washers by weight. I found that difficult to believe. This system is also much easier to use than whatever hodgepodge I was planning on using with DLIPF’s PVC-based nose weight system.

Launch	Date	Location	Motor	Goal	Outcome
1	2024-04-13	ROC Lucerne		Test flight, L1 Certification	Success, L1
1	2024-11-09	ROC Lucerne		Structure test	Success

Successful L1 attempt on 2024-04-13, with slight damage to coupler.
One fin was warped upon arrival of kit; I should have returned the kit, but didn’t. Noted some wobble on ascent, but trajectory was mostly smooth. Tried to film the launch from the ground, but the ground camera cooked and stopped recording before launch. Motor had been literally thrown at my door by the shippers, so I was a bit worried that it was going to CATO on the pad or go awry somehow, but it didn’t at all. Deployment charge fired just fine and chute deployed, but shock cord tangled around the nomex chute protector blanket and caused the cord’s length to cap out at around 3 feet between fore and aft sections, leading to the aft swinging around. A fin struck the coupler and created a small hole, though not enough that reflight would not be possible. The nomex chute protector was evidently large enough to make a problem out of itself, but at the same time was too small to completely protect the parachute, and a small hole was burned through the chute. This acted more like a spill hole than anything else, and the chute was technically reusable.

Second flight was on 2024-11-09 and featured a new parachute and nomex deployment bag instead of a simple parachute blanket.
I decided that I needed a high-acceleration test of the fins to shake out any issues with the alignment. Joe Barnard stopped by and gave his blessing, though did recommended a pull test of the new deployment bag, which performed well after a triple-check. Flight was on an Aerotech H550, a much higher impulse motor than the first flight, and flew much straighter, with no wobble. Added nose mass was 447 g. Chute deployment, descent, and landing were flawless. Will definitely be using deployment bags on anything worth more than a few hundred bucks.

Avionics

FC1

Hardware and software; flown once on George 2 and both flight- and crash-tested.

blackbox

Hardware and software still under development, with a primary goal of data resilience to high-speed and high-energy destructive events.