www.bobarnott.com: rocketry - The UK's premier High Power Rocketry Homepage

My Level 1 flight, Copyright © Ben Jarvis. I can remember the first time I decided that I was going to launch a model rocket. It was during a free period at high school and I was sitting in the library and supposed to be doing my homework, instead I was reading a copy of Aero Modeller magazine. One of the articles showed a couple of people launching some small rockets, I decided there and then that I was going to do the same.

Well it took about 5 or 6 years for me to actually get round to buying a rocket kit. I bought an Estes starter set from Beatties in Aberdeen and spent the rest of the week building the two rockets that came with it. I had a friend who lived about 15 miles outside Aberdeen on a farm, so I phoned him up and one weekend went out to launch my first rocket. Well, what can you say, the first time you hear that whoosh and your rocket screams into the sky, I was hooked.

After building numerous Estes kits I found that I wasn't the only rocketeer in the UK and ended up spending an afternoon at the UKRA '98 launch event. The weather was pretty grotty, but I got to see my first high power rockets and I knew then that I had to step up and fly the bigger stuff. I certified UKRA Level 1 at the International Rocket Week in August of 1999 and my wallet has never been the same since!

Since 1999 things haven't always gone to plan, a period of unemployment, getting married and having a child, have all limited my participation at times. I have found time, however, to help setup the East Anglian Rocketry Society, certify UKRA Level 2 and be a member of both the UKRA and EARS committees. I'm hopeful that once my kids grow up a bit I can get more involved again and interest my kids at the same time.

I always have a number of projects on the go, some have been on the go for years. As with everything I do, they will all get built eventually, so keep checking back for updates and construction reports. What the future holds for my rocketry I don't know, but there are a lot of things I still want to do, it's just a matter of finding the time.

9th November 2006

I'm currently in the middle of trying to renew my explosive certificate and registered store, shame things have become a bit more complicated in the three years since I last applied. The MSER have made things more complicated and it's looking like I'll need to get an Acquire & Keep certificate from the majority of motors and an Acquire Only for Pro75 & Pro98 motors; that is unless I want to rig the house with a monitored alarm. It's also going to cost me a damn sight more than �13, which is what I last paid when registering an explosive store...

6th November 2006

Typical, I turn up at the November EARS launch with a rocket and am then unable to fly it... You can read why in the launch report and you can see the photos I took here.

I also bought a GWiz MCII with some of my birthday money. I haven't rigged it up to the computer yet, heck, I haven't even powered it up or read the manual. But it does mean my two stage projects are now a go as I've got something that can light the sustainer...

27th September 2006

Well, it's been a while... I've not flown anything since 2004, I've not built anything in even longer and it's all due to getting married and having a child. I've sort of been getting slowly sucked back into to wanting to fly over the last few weeks, so we'll see where that leads us. I was ill for part of last week, so I decided to catalogue all my rocket bits to see what I had. The results of that were quite interesting and I'll be slowly updating the projects section as I put a few things through RockSim.

Webrings