Mini are the best! Fast!
Back in the mid to late 90s at Glamis, me me buddy Chris and Ken the Giant had the brilliant idea one drunken night around the campfire to set up the launch pad of an Estes rocket in the bed of Chris’ dark green metallic Chevy xtra cab half ton and crack a chemlight open and drizzle some glow in the darkness juice on the rocket before launch.
And up it went! We watched where it landed and looked down.
The bed of Chris truck looked like a murder scene under black light
Took the 3 of us 20 minutes to clean that shit out of the bed of his truck.
Years later when Ken retired and moved up to Oroville I bought a CT90 from him and a few nicknacks out of his garage on his way out.
He threw in the Rocket kit with a few engines and a couple size rockets.
Sat in my garage a few years. Then
See post #19
A football field would be fine for this. Just make sure there’s little to no wind. The C engines will go up to 1100ft, but it’s also under parachute for 1100ft and can drift a long ways away even if there’s no prevalent wind.
Each motor series is a big step up. Id say you are going about 500 feet or more higher with each series, but this is all variable depending on the rocket size/weight and engines burn number.
We didn't have much money growing up, so for us, it was old paper towel/toilet paper/gift wrap rolls and hand-shaped balsa wood nose cones and fins. Or we scavenged/recycled plastic nose cones from other kids failed launches.
We would make the motor mounts by layering/molding paper, soaked in Elmers glue, wrapped around a used motor. It was super fun, learning thru trial and error.
We built our own launch stations, too.
I hand-built a bitchen rocket shaped after a Nike Ajax missile...man, I wish I could share pics of it. It came out great.
I guess we just weren't happy with anything out of the box, except for the motors themselves.
Awesome, cheap hobby.
Congrats
The A & B don’t seem too terribly different, obviously the B goes higher, but it’s not usually a PIA to recover it. The C is a whole nother animal, it’s noticeably higher and much more prone to drift under canopy. When you light off the C you’ll know it lol, it burns a long time.
As a teenager I built an E engine Estes kit once that still used the cardboard tube. It would crumple the tube on every launch and go sideways, fly 1/4 mi away lol. Fun times but starts to get real expensive real quick when you’re broke lol.
No but I want one now.
lol! If you got one good ignition out of 10 or 12 attempts, you were doing good!
CAMROC Baby!My favorite one was the space shuttle. Little foam shuttle would disconnect and fly back on its own while the rocket came down on parachutes. There was also one I had with a 110 camera in it that would take a picture when the chute fired. Lots of cool memories. We had a priest at the Catholic Church who would buy our rockets for us and have us run out at the end of mass and fire the rockets when people walked out after service. He loved them.
It’s a rocket. Solid fuel pellets ( I forget compound) fuse you feed in the nozzle to light the fuel. I attached them to various vehicles with limited success. Best was worth it though.
This is beautiful. Exactly the shit we dreamt up.It’s a rocket. Solid fuel pellets ( I forget compound) fuse you feed in the nozzle to light the fuel. I attached them to various vehicles with limited success. Best was worth it though.
Made a glider. Solid balsa type with clay on the nose and a real airfoil solidbalsa wing. Walked miles. To the park. Set on the ground a got it to ignite. Skidded along the dg on baseball field and took off.
Low thrust vector with wing lift and it just arched up and looped at about 150’ (?)
I was so excited as it came back around and then “shit run!” As it came right back to the launch area about a foot off the ground. Continuing back up to just past vertical, stalled, and glided across the field.
One of the best as a kid, “ hey let’s put…”
I ever had
Thank you for this infomation
