Ready to Drag Race

5 responses to “Ready to Drag Race”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 5, 2011 at 12:16 am

   Tom with his toy box of chemicals. For that extra kick at the pad, he dipped his igniters in some fluorinated version of an oxidizer:
   

   "Smile for the camera, as it’s the last we’ll see of these rockets" I said. "Ha!" they chortled…

   

   Oops – turned out to be true. =)

   My little blue Thug was the fastest, by far, and it flew straight as an arrow and just disappeared into the sky (the color scheme is like sky camo it seems). We learned the hard way that the motor does not have a long enough burn time to generate enough residual heat to keep the HTPB delay grain burning past depressurization. They should be labeled as plugged motors since the ejection charge will never be lit. Hence, it comes back ballistic and drills into the ground. Tom is taking it as a challenge to rebuild her from the remains. =)

   Erik’s Blastoff:
   
   He was last off the pad, and the rocket went missing. But to his credit, weak batteries were unable to launch all our rockets in tandem and so we had to do them serially. Erik’s K250 burned gloriously up and out of sight with a long 9 second burn.

   I am pulling the video together from our rocket. In the meantime, here is a very cool slo-mo video of another guy David’s high-power rocket becoming a rotary flamethrower. The J350 motor melted the aluminum forward seal disc and the aluminum forward closure on the motor casing. Last year, a similar failure made for some beautiful rocket art.

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2. 

   Astrocatou

   Dec 5, 2011 at 1:09 am

   1 crashed
   1 burned
   1 disappeared
   ??
   Sounds more like my experience with this hobby..

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 5, 2011 at 5:29 am

   But just as one might lose the faith, the last one was glorious…. (story to come)….

   That tally sounds just like the fate of startups. =)

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4. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 8, 2011 at 7:33 pm

   P.S. links to photos and video here

   

   and Tom digging out the Thug off in the distance…. =)
   

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5. 

   Victor1

   Dec 9, 2011 at 4:10 am

   Geez is that Thug durable or what? How many flights have you gotten out of it?

   Great pix! Marvelous aerial view, super clean.

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