My one and only ill-fated L1 attempt
 

Here are some(lo-res) pictures of me with my Yank IRIS while prepping my rocket, and a link to the launch video. This was "supposed" to be an H238T reload. It appeard to have the oomph of a D12! Needless to say, I lost interest in trying high power after that. This was taken back in August of 2002.

Here's the link to the launch video.

http://www.rocketshoppe.com/photos/L1attempt.mpg

Man, that did look gutless. Do you remember the delay (S or M)?

I believe it was a short, I can't remember though. Whatever delay it was that was recommended for that rocket is what I used. If you do a stop frame of the video, you can see the ejection charge fired just before it hit the ground, blasting the cone into the ground that much harder. :( It hit so hard the cone literally turned inside out.

I've got pics of the aftermath around here somewhere.

More pics
 

Here's more pics I dug up. These are from my camera. The first set was from another club member. I like :rolleyes: the shot coming down.

Man, that's painful to watch. I had a two stage Standard Missile do something like that. All the fins were made of alumilite with lots of details. Electronic staging, etc... I was crushed. Since then I've never put that much work into a scale model.

My L1 cert rocket was lost in the **** tree. Fortunately that doesn't disqualify the attempt. Never did get it back, and lost a RMS sytstem along with it.

Yuck. 11 seconds of hell. And some of the guys I fly with can't understand why I still with the small stuff. :confused: I don't need the aggravation.

Ouch!

That is a cool whistling sound as it comes in, though.

Heh, ya. That video was shot by another club member's son. Note how close he was to where it "landed". :eek:

I have the video a member took using my video camera on VHS-C still. One of these days I'll get it tranferred to digital. That one has a bunch of funny commentary added to it by the guy that was shooting it for me.

HPR can be fun, too
 

Guys,
HPR can be fun. Lord knows my first few attempts were awful with two zippers, a cato and an unstable crash before successfully putting one up, but since then, I've flown ~6 H-I impulse flights with no problems (not counting the one bad J :)

I'm working on another L2 bird right now along with a rocket for hybrids (SRS) and I have a couple of complex electronic (airstarted outboards, staging, deployment) birds coming up in the queue.

While I lament the absence of A3-6T's, 1/2A3-0T's, et al, I realize this is the best of times. I missed out on the stuff I was too young/poor/inexperienced to participate in during the late sixties/early seventies. But I'm not gonna miss the brass ring this time. I want to burn one of everything. There's probably too much available to do it all, but I can at least try :)

While there's no B14-0 to get a 3-stager moving with authority, there are some neat AP motors out there that will get larger rockets moving off the rod. My 2.2" Midget is too heavy to be booster on a D12-0, so I need to use a bigger booster. All I gotta do is figure out how to light the sustainer - ie, build a (reliable) staging timer. If I can make it work on the 2.2" Midget, then I'll build a 2.6" or 3" HPR version. The point is to burn what's available, even if you got to build a rocket to put it in. That's easier than waiting for Estes, Quest or somebody else to resurrect C5-0's or 1/4A4-4T's.

You can fly and enjoy HPR, and do so without turning into an HPR megalomaniac snob that none of us like. If you don't want to invest in the hardware, and that's entirely understandable, borrow it. I've put up three 29mm HPR flights on borrowed cases, and returned them Boy Scout style, cleaner than when I got 'em. If you've built a few 24/40 or 29/40-120 motors, the AT 29mm HPR motors are about the same.

I picked up a complete AT 38mm set used for $200 - 6 cases, late model closures and forward seal disk. (I didn't get the new 120Ns case, 'tho). I used it for the first time a couple weeks ago - I357 - on an upscale Midget (4").

Like so many other Old-Far...er...Rocketeers, I enjoy scratchbuilding, whether I'm cloning or doing an original. For HPR, I just scale up from there. I haven't seen many HPR kits that called to me, but I get a big kick out of taking classic designs and putting my upscale, HPR spin on them. Besides a 3.2" Bertha and 4" Midget, I have a 3" Avenger in the works (for the SRS hybrids). And my new L2 bird is a Sat-1b inspired, 54mm powered scratchbuild called the Doug-1b. Flying a big upscale or takeoff of a well known kit really makes HPR fun for me.

Doug