Last years UKRA event was my first organised rocket launch, and was the first time I had seen High Power Rockets being flown. This years event was again held at Garlands Shooting ground near Tamworth, home of the THRUST rocket club. I was really looking forward to this launch as I had built a shed load of rockets to take with me, some of them were Estes rockets and some of them were scratch built designs. I had built some rockets that were clustered, and some that took 29mm motors, so there was going to be quite a few firsts for me at this launch

I arrived late on the Friday night because I took so long to pack the car with all my stuff. I set up my tent and unloaded some of my stuff from the car. After finishing all of that I decided that I needed a beer and the evening progressed from there, I can't remember what time I went to bed but it wasn't early.

Saturday started off very nice, warm, sunny and just a lightish breeze. I was very keen to get out and fly some rockets so I preped my Estes Python and Seahawk with D12-5 motors. Both had very good flights and were recovered very close to the pad. The Pyhton landed on the gravel road the runs down one side of the launch area and chipped a bit off the edge of one of it's fins.

I had a 24mm 2 engine cluster rocket called Acid Flashback that I'd designed and wanted to fly, but I'd been having problems wi the launch lugs, they kept on falling off. So I asked around for some advice and was told the ones I was using might be a bit small and that I should change the epoxy I was using to hold them on with. So I cut two new launch lugs from a bit of brass tubing and epoxied them to the body tube. After an hour or so it was clear that these were solid and would do the job nicely, so I preped the rocket with two D12-5's and headed for the pad.

I was very nervous as the rocket sat on the pad as it would be the first ever scratch built rocket that I'd ever flown. Not only that, but it would also be the first cluster rocket I'd ever flown, so I was covering a lot of new ground with this rocket. I was given a countdown and pressed the launch button, whoosh! A perfect flight, I was really happy as the parachute depolyed at apogee and I managed to recover it with out a scratch. I imediately decided that I should fly it on a cluster of 2 AeroTech E15's, unfortunetly Pete's Rockets didn't have any with the right delay so I bought two E30's instead.

With the succesful launch of Acid Flashback I decided that I should deffinately try and fly MTRS with a 29mm single use motor. So while I was purchasing the two E30's I also bought a G80 and a PML parachute, all I needed to do now was epoxy a couple of launch lugs on to it. I got a chance to launch it after Pete had demo'd a R.A.T.T. Works H70 hybrid motor. I was really crapping it for this launch as it was the biggest rocket I'd ever built and I'd never used composite motors before. You can read a detailed flight report of this rocket on the MTRS page. Unfortunately I didn't get to launch any more rockets on the Saturday evening as I was searching for MTRS, for about 2 and a bit hours.

Sunday started very dipressingly as it was chucking it down with rain from the early hours, the cloud level was quite low and the wind had picked up and changed direction. All flying was scrubbed in the morning and was nearly scrubbed in the afternoon, but the rain stopped for long enough to allow a few rockets to be flown. Becasue I only had an aquire and use explosives licence, I needed to either fly the two E30's I had or give them to someone to store for me.

When the weather cleared up I decided that Acid Flashback wouldn't survive two E30's so I preped it with 2 D12's instead. This still left me with the two E's, so I put one in my Estes Python and the other in my Estes Black Brant II. Acid Flashback flew first, I'd put a smaller parachute in it so that it would drop quicker in the wind, but as you can see from it's webpage the parachute got tangled around the kevlar shock cord and caused the rocket to drop too fast.

So I then launched the Python which screamed off the pad and coasted to some incredible height, it landed a couple of fields away and after I recovered it I managed to lose the nose cone somehow. All that was left was to fly the Black Brant and as it turned out this was the last rocket to be launched. I saw it leave the pad, and then someone pointed it out as it drifted miles away from the launch site. I never really expected to get it back, but it would have been nice, in retrospect I shouldn't have launched it on that motor with a streamer that big in that wind.

After the launching had finished it rained intermitantly for a couple of hours until around 6-6.30 when it started to finally clear up, the drive home was quite pleasant in the evening sunshine. All in all I had a great time and managed to launch some cool rockets and talk to a lot of people most of whom had some great ideas about rockets and rocket equipment.

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Last update: Tuesday, 30-Mar-2004 03:44:28 EST