WELD Fall 2009

Launch Report, Fall WELD, October 10-11, 2009

Those of you who stayed home this weekend because of the bad weather forecast made a real bad mistake! Seriously, you really blew it. Saturday morning was partly cloudy, becoming more cloudy as the day went on, but the clouds stayed at around 5,000 feet up all day until the rain showers moved in at about 4:00 PM. Sunday morning was clear, a brief shower moved in around 11:30 AM and when it cleared out, the clouds cleared, the winds dropped, and we had one of the most perfect flying days ever seen at Bayboro, NC. In addition, M’s and N’s were being flown all over the place! If you rely on the weather forecast to determine your participation at Bayboro, you are simply wasting the best rocketry resource east of the Mississippi River. First I will insert the motor use summary and then castigate you some more for your sloth and lack of spirit.

Motor	Sat	Sun	Total
G		4	4
H	1	2	3
I	3	1	4
J		1	1
K	3	1	4
L
M	1	1	2
N		2	2
Total	8	12	20

The big event for the whole weekend was the Saturday flight by Jim Livingston of the 2-stage Nike-Ajax. This was a perfect scale model, somewhere around 1/3 scale. The boost was managed by a homemade 3" M1800 sporting a long blue flame, staging to a homemade K580. Both boost and sustain phases were perfect and the sustainer attained 10,000 feet before disassembly and perfect recovery. To add a little verisimilitude, the sustainer waivered and coned a little before settling down into a perfect straight-up trajectory, like a real guided missile locking on to target. This project had redundant timers and altimeters in both sections, a real technical challenge to get right.

Ray Bryant joined us for the first time in while and flew several interesting projects. The most challenging was his Triple Trouble consisting of a central rocket powered by an AMW K650RR, carrying 3 dropping side-pods powered by H180’s ignited by accelerometer packs. The latching mechanisms and the aluminum slots for the pods were absolutely ingenious, but the fins on the main rocket began to flap under the aerodynamic force, and they ripped off about the time the side-pods were beginning to ignite, and it took Ray most of Sunday morning to get the fragments collected out of the corn field. Still, it was an exciting project, well executed, and provided a lot of entertainment for everybody [except for you chumps who stayed home this weekend!]

Rich and Olga Miller joined us for the first time since the Battleboro days and Rich flew two rockets carrying his own homemade altimeters. He was flying some old propellant in Aerotech cases, and only one of the two motors survived the flight, but the altimeters worked perfectly. If you stayed home this weekend, you lost any chance to talk with Rich about his plans to market these altimeters and all of the different variants he plans to sell.

Ken Strowd was back with a static test of one of his sugar motors that produced a very entertaining concussion and filled the air with mud and corn-stalks! We need to take up a collection and buy Ken some 6160 T6 aluminum stock to work with, so he can throw away the soft aluminum he finds in the junk yards.

Alan Whitmore flew his Astro-Mollusk II on a homemade K1000 that made the rocket completely disappear! No pops were heard at apogee, no main chute deployment was observed, and no signal was coming in from the Walston. About a half-hour later, somebody chasing another rocket almost drove over the Astro-Mollusk on one of the dirt roads bordering a field about ¾ mile away. 7104 feet.

Sunday started out cloudy, windy, and about 15 degrees cooler than Saturday. Alan Whitmore got things started by totally destroying the brand-new V3 Long on a flight with a 6-grain homemade 38mm I motor. The ARTS2 decided not to fire either the main or apogee charge and committed suicide, taking out a Walston transmitter, the parachute, the nose cone, and everything but the fin section.

Natalie Harrell, one of our NAR flyers since the spring, aced her Tripoli level one certification flight on Sunday, with a breathtaking launch of her Talon 2 on an AT H250G, and a perfect recovery.

Those of you who have been following this series of reports will remember the celebration that we originally proposed back in the Fall of 2007: "Rebuild, repair, repaint, reconfigure, and refurbish your level 3 rocket and fly it on a Homemade Research motor", an event originally planned for the Fall WELD 2007 event, but which the weather has stretched out for 2 years. On Sunday, the last participant finally flew his entry: Dennis Hill flew his Wolf 359 on a 3 grain 115mm M motor made from the very mild Black Velvet propellant. Wolf 359 has a LOT of history. Dennis certified with this vehicle in March of 1997 and several years later it was partially destroyed in the horrible floods that devastated eastern North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. The rebuilt Wolf was 11 feet long, 9" in diameter, weighed 72 lbs, and finished in shiny gold and black, just like the original. The boost was perfect, the deployment started out well, but the main chute got tangled up somewhat, and the landing broke some fins and resulted in a little damage in the fin section. Not bad at all for a really old rocket!

Reed Goodwin-Johansson was working hard all Sunday on a college physics project involving thrust versus altitude calculations that involved multiple flights with his X-calibur and a variety of G motors. I only recall one problem with a faulty delay grain.

The large-caliber entertainment on Sunday was provided by out visitors from South Carolina, Ed Fenton and Jack Orr. They completely shocked your correspondent by bringing 2 N’s and a K motor, all made from APCP and not a single sugar motor or hybrid! The propellant was apparently all cast up in a single session and was made from a very famous Tom Binford formula. Ed Fenton was the first to fly, putting up his Uranus MTV IV on an N1664. Liftoff was slow and stately, and recovery was just about perfect. Next up, Jack Orr put up his 4" diameter Hot Pursuit on a K600 made from the same propellant. The boost phase was spectacular, but the altimeter let the team down and there was some damage. Finally, Jack launched his Thunder Chicken on 3 long grains of the same propellant in a 115mm casing, and right after liftoff things began to go bad in a big way! The motor was not generating enough power to get the 75 pound rocket moving fast enough when it left the pad, so 6.5 seconds later, when the motor was still burning hard and putting out the power, the rocket was moving horizontally and the altimeter fired the apogee charge. Parachutes came out and the destruction was "general and widespread". The sun was well down on the horizon when your correspondent finally collected Ed and Jack from the soybeans and led them to supper at a local seafood restaurant. Our South Carolina brothers do most of their flying on a sod farm, but they are still in fairly good shape. Ed and Jack both spent about 3 hours on Sunday fighting their way through the beans and stumbling over the corn stubble in the course of 3 very athletic rocket recoveries, but at sundown they were still moving crisply!

Many, many thanks to all of you who helped with tearing down the equipment and packing the trailer. My knee is still a little sore, and I need all the help I can get, especially help that involves digging nose cones out of the deep, sandy soil. Thank you, Jim Livingston!

Alan Whitmore

Prefect, Tripoli East NC

PHOTO'S by Reed Goodwin-Johansson

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