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Originally Posted by Bill
Wadding is reusable too.
Bill
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Yep, reuse old wadding all the time.
When the club was flying out here regularly, Betty and Keira and I would go for a walk down through the launching field the next day and I'd return with a pocketful of used ignitor plugs and spent wadding...
The ignitor plugs sorta rain down around the pads... the densest concentration is right around the deflector, and they gradually thin out as they move outwards... Think the furthest I've found one from the pad was about ten feet away... (not that they don't go further, but there's a LOT of ground surface for them to get lost on the farther away from the pad you get, so you're probability of finding them goes WAY down...)
I got some funny looks loading burned and spotted wadding with holes in it into my rocket, topped by a sheet of new wadding... I always load the most badly burned pieces first (since they're going to take the hardest hit at ejection and thus won't be fit for another flight anyway, and it saves the newer, less damaged wadding to be recovered and used again...) Any particles that get past the ratty burned wadding just burns a hole in the stuff further up and make it ratty to be used next to the motor on the next flight...
Arguing that you can't reuse plugs... that's just SILLY... So long as it's not melted beyond recognition, OF COURSE they're reusable...
Most irritating thing was when I picked up a fistful of spent Estes ignitor wire thrown down around the pad after a launch one time... that stuff is BAD... that wire would play heck with the mouth and digestive system of our cows... So I had a discussion with the club advisor who did the setup and teardown, and he apologized and agreed to put out a couple five gallon buckets next to the pads for folks to toss spent ignitors and shooter wire into when they went to hook up their rocket for the next launch... and he made sure to bring it to everyone's attention to USE THE BUCKETS and not toss ignitor wire on the ground...
Later! OL JR
