In Need of Inspiration

I have been in the market for a table for my Rocket Room. I was thinking of getting a folding table - a six-foot long, plastic top folding table, the sturdy kind you find at your finer non-profit board meetings and family reunions. Something perfectly flat. My current work surface wasn't cutting it.

A metal shelving unit with a board on top was my previous work surface these last few months.
The shelves are great, but the top is a little high, a little small, and the board isn't flat.

I found a nice folding table on Amazon which I could get delivered free for about $59.

Then, the other night, the city of Boston presented me a gift: A solid, sturdy, six-foot long oak table, discarded, left by the curb right outside my house.

The top alone may have weighed nearly 100 pounds, and it wasn't fun getting it upstairs, but you can't beat free, and it's perfect for rocket-building.

There's just one problem with this table.

Right now, I have about 5 or 6 rocket projects on it, and I haven't made much progress at all on any of them. I've been working very slowly.

Last Saturday, I hung out in the rocket room almost all day, and only did one thing: sanded some wood filler off a balsa nose cone.

I need some inspiration.

Thankfully, I am four days away from my first club rocket launch, in Amesbury, MA, with CMASS.

I spend a lot more time building than I do launching. And I love building rockets. But there has to be a goal. Rockets are meant to fly. I noticed in the past that if I hadn't launched in a while, I tended to slow down my building.

Further complications to living here is that I can only go so far in a build before I encounter a major challenge - painting.

At the old homestead, I had a large grassy area surrounded by trees. As long as it wasn't too breezy, it was a perfect painting area.

I'm considering several options here: joining a maker space, or maybe building an indoor painting booth. Perhaps I'll make friends with someone at the club who happens to work in an auto body painting shop, and we could paint rockets on the weekend.

So, there are some challenges to being a rocketeer in a big city, as opposed to a suburban area, one of them being that I can't just go outside and launch whenever I feel the need. I'm considering a future post on this subject - Challenges for the Big City Rocketeer - but I need to find some solutions for it first!

My final challenge lately is this blog. It's been too filled with posts exactly like this one: what I'm doing, what I'm not doing, blah blah... This is exactly what I want this blog not to be - a personal catalog of rockets I'm building or not building. This is meant to be a blog for rocket n00bs to get some tips and information, and for more experienced rocketeers to have another place to read about rockets, even if it's stuff they probably already know, and to look at cool rocket pictures.

This launch should do the trick. I have a feeling my mind is going to be blown this weekend, with higher flights and larger rockets than I've ever seen in person before. In the past, whenever I've come back from a launch, I'm inspired and ready to build!

My short-term goals therefore:

• Finish building a rocket, already!
• Figure out the painting problem
• Write some more how-to posts for n00bs on this blog.

I did get a little bit of inspriation in the mail yesterday. One perk of membership in the National Association of Rocketry is a subscription to Sport Rocketry magazine - the official NAR magazine. I haven't had a magazine subscription in ages, and I was excited to finally see my first issue in the mailbox.

Launch. Then build. And write something of substance for all my fellow rocket n00bs.

T-minus four days...

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