Rocket Repairs

All ready to fly.

Both rockets failed to deploy parachutes on their prior launches, and suffered different indignations.

The Brighthawk on the left, went into a nauseating spin-roll with a strap-on video cam recording the return to Earth and facture into six pieces.

The purple LOC Expediter shed the same videocam as it went supersonic and out of sight overhead. I retrieved it from Lost & Found a year later, and from the distintegration of the upper half, it clearly came back as a ballistic lawn dart. After sawing off the old coupler, I left the lower body untouched out of pride at its robustness (I had wrapped it in Kevlar and fiberglass during construction), so it still sports some unappetizing nibbles from curious field mice.

Overall, a fine weekend of repairs. I’ll post the before shots below.

And in the middle is the newest arrival – a HUGE Animal Motor Works motor casing and graphite nozzle. For a sense of scale, it has 500x the thrust of the biggest Estes rocket motor. Can’t wait to see the V2.1 fly with a N2801 Skidmark propellant. But that’s illegal in California, so we have to go to Nevada. =)