Tree Recovery Device

Today, on the Model Rocketry Fanatics!!! Facebook group, someone posted the following video of a homemade device for recovering things (quadcopters, model rockets, etc.) from tall trees.

"Rocket-eating trees" are a hazard encountered by all model rocketeers. Some clubs bring a long pole with a hook on the end for tree recovery. This device, while it may be tricky to operate, might be another option for getting a rocket down from thin, high branches.

The 3D Rocketry Nautilus II - my first loss to a tree

Of course, this recovery device must be used sensibly. Part 11 of the Model Rocket Safety Code states "I will not attempt to recover my rocket from power lines, tall trees, or other dangerous places."

While it's usually considered acceptable to use a tool (like a long pole) to recover a rocket from a tree, if there are power lines running near or through the tree in question, you certainly shouldn't attempt to shoot a fishing line at the rocket. Contact between a power line and the ground - with you in the middle - is a sure way to get electrocuted!

This recovery device might be a bit clunky to operate, but it might be worth the trouble in order to not leave a rocket behind on the field. That can be pretty heartbreaking.

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Launched Three, Lost Three

My fleet has grown smaller.

On Wednesday, Chad and another friend - Jeff - and I launched some rockets. It was going to be either Wednesday or Thursday, but the weather looked bad on Thursday, so we had a small launch window.

Unfortunately, while the winds seemed light, they were stronger than I thought, especially at altitude.

This was my first loss. Losing rockets is an inevitable hazard of rocketry, but this was my first, and man, was it a bummer!

But I learned a couple things on this launch. The first is Check your Go Fever. If the winds look bad, you don't have to launch.

The second is that Chad is a terrible videographer. The footage of the launches is terrible. If my girlfriend had been in town, I'd have some spectacular footage to show you. Fortunately, Jeff got some good pictures.

Chad, as I've reported here before, has lost most of his rockets, and I think he was secretly happy this happened to me. I was actually glad he was there to witness it, so he'd stop whining "Oh, I'm Daniel, and I never lose rockets!"

I'd brought all my bigger rockets, including a few I'd never launched before. Once I noticed it was a little windy, though, I had to make a decision what I was going to try to launch. I was not about to go with the Quest Quadrunner, after all the trouble I'd gone through building it. And replacing it would cost me nearly fifty bucks.

The first loss was the most painful. It was the just-built Cosmic Explorer with an E motor upgrade.

On the left: my original Cosmic Explorer which can only hold up to a C motor.
On the right: the just-completed Cosmic Explorer with an E-sized motor mount -
capable of going three times as high

I knew this was a risk, with a bit of wind. But I'd gotten one of the fins on slightly crooked, and had a little problem with the paint job. And I have two more of them I can build, so I said "screw it! Let's launch this sucker!"

 
The first thing that happened was that my launch controller wasn't working. I gave it a little shake, and heard some rattling around inside. "That doesn't sound good," Jeff said. I'm not the best at soldering... Fortunately, I had my Estes launch controllers with me. No way to do a cluster launch with that, but I was nervous about those rockets anyway.

The flight was amazing. About 1800 feet or more, straight up. That E9 black powder motor made a huge sound (E is all I've gotten up to at this point, so I'm still impressed by it), lots of smoke, and the thing just soared.

But then, there was no tracking smoke, and after a moment, we lost sight of the rocket completely!

Then, for a second, we caught sight of the parachute. It was so high up and so tiny that I thought it hadn't opened all the way. But it had. 1800 feet might be a low guestimate, and I'm basing it on my OpenRocket simulation. The Cosmic Explorer has a big red parachute, and it was so far away.

After a second, I lost sight of it again. We kept searching the skies for it, and it just vanished. It had headed northwest, but that's all I knew. If it had crashed to the ground, or gotten stuck in a tree, I'd have been sad about that, but the fact that it simply disappeared was... I don't know. I just wanted to know where it had gone.

Sarcasm: Chad reaches out with eyes closed to catch the rocket as it falls straight down...

OK, I knew launching the Cosmic Explorer might be a bad idea. But I decided to keep going. Go Fever.

Next I put the 3D Rocketry Nautilus II on the pad.

This, I thought, would be fine. We have a large flying field, the Nautilus II is fatter and only takes a D motor, and it has a smaller parachute. Besides, it had suffered some major fin damage on its first flight, so I decided to press on with it.

Again, the flight was awesome. Much straighter than the first time I'd launched it, and very high - though not out of sight.

As soon as the chute opened, I thought, oh, no... It's going to go over the trees at the end of the field!

Chad ran to see if he could catch the rocket, which he likes to do. He's like a labrador retriever, and we just can't keep him off the couch...

Then, instead of going over the trees, the Nautilus II landed in the tops of them.

"Rocket-eating trees" are a commonly mentioned hazard in rocketry, and Chad is the Charlie Brown of rockets, but this was my first loss to the trees. And this is a good, open field, so it's not a huge risk here, but it happened.

The only trees to worry about are at the north end of the field.

 Chad ran to see if he could recover the rocket. There it was, tantalizingly dangling from the very end of a thin, outer branch. If the wind changed direction, it might have fallen right out, but the wind was holding the rocket securely on the branch.

I decided to try one last thing. I had the Estes Athena in the bottom of the box. This is a ready-to-fly model I got for $7. I thought If I can get this back, maybe I'll continue launching. If not, I didn't build it, so I won't be sad about it. I tilted the pad slightly into the wind, so that it would fly less high, but possibly come back and land on the field.

All rockets turn somewhat into the wind. For n00bs, this is referred to as "weathercocking." It happens whether you want it to or not. But you can take advantage of it - you can tilt into the wind, and have the rocket return closed to the launch area, or tilt it slightly with the wind, and the rocket will straighten up as it weathercocks, and achieve a higher altitude than it would if launched straight up in windy conditions.

It did weathercock into the wind, and I had hope of getting it back. But the chute opened, and we saw it streak across the sky - the wind must have picked up a lot! It moved so fast, it was like watching Sputnik cross the night sky. It flew over the trees at the end of the field, right over Chad's head, and disappeared.

Chad and Jeff had to leave, and I spent the next hour and a half hiking corn fields looking for the Cosmic Explorer. It had traveled northwest, so I felt I had a good chance of recovering it.

I walked up the hill to the trees and saw the Nautilus II dangling from the branch. I had to cross some train tracks and find a way through the thick brush to the corn field. I walked the whole thing, and up into some grass and woods. Eventually, I realized I shouldn't spend a lot of time hiking around on someone's property, so I hiked back.

I kept thinking I saw it, but it kept turning out to be broken corn stalks gleaming in the falling sun. In any case, I never saw that red chute flutter in the breeze.

Obviously, nothing is green there right now...

I realized that thing could have gone for a mile or two! Or it could have landed somewhere where I couldn't get to or just didn't notice.

I drove around the area, trying to see if I could spot it in an open patch of land. Nothing...

It was only after searching for the Cosmic Explorer that I realized how bummed out I was to lose it. I only got to launch it once, I thought. You can launch any rocket once. The trick is launching it more than once.

I drove back the next day, hopeful that a change in the wind had knocked the Nautilus II from the branch it hung from. Instead, it had become more tangled, and on this day it twisted in the breeze. Today, it's raining pretty hard, so even if it eventually comes down, it will probably be ruined.

So, I lost a few rockets.

But when I got home that night, I started fiddling around with OpenRocket. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how quickly I could design a little rocket for altitude and speed, using just an E motor and parts I already had. In about twenty minutes, I came up with a design that should top 2600 feet and go Mach .58, or 3500 feet at Mach .61 if I add a D motor booster. I called it Sounder I (for now), and I may lose it, but it was easy and cheap, and it's kind of an experiment. I'm mostly interested in building larger rockets, but I wanted to play around with a simple, high performance design.

I started building it the next day.

Sounder I sustainer, nearly done. I built this in an evening.

I also started building the first scratch design I came up with months ago, a 3-motor cluster called the Trident A.

The Trident A motor mount, part of which will be exposed to view

So, I'm replenishing the fleet.

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2014 Slo Mo Launch Supercut

My first annual slo-mo launch supercut is finished! Here are most of the launches I have done since I first got started in July of this last year. The first three are choppy, but after that I realized I had the 60 frames per second function on the camera.

I was worried I wouldn't have enough footage of larger rockets to make a good video. Smaller rockets are less impressive on video than larger ones. But I realized, once I slowed the footage down, that in slow motion, even tiny Estes rockets look almost majestic.

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5... 4... 3... 2...

I've nearly completed the three rockets I've been working on for a month and a half, just in time for tomorrow's Epic Rocket Launch. Just a bit of paint here, a few stickers there, and a couple knots tied, and we'll be All Systems Go.

Janus II with camera payload bay, Quest Quadrunner 4-motor cluster rocket,
and 3D Rocketry's Nautilus II, the first kit I ever purchased
which wasn't from Estes (which is where most of us start)

All that's needed now is a few details.

The Janus II - which is the big brother of my first ever designed-and-built (or "scratch built") rocket Janus I - will get a touch of black on the fin tips.

Looking at this rocket, with the gray body and fat payload section, it kind of reminds me of a shark - which gave me an idea for a new design I'm going to play with (but which in the end may be unstable and therefore unflyable) called the Hammerhead. Mostly I like names for rockets that don't try too hard to sound "badass," but I might make an exception in this case. Stay tuned.

Here are the two Janus models side by side for comparison.

Janus I and Janus II. Janus I uses standard 18mm (A-C) rocket motors,  while
Janus II is designed for 24mm motors - one D and one E. Both are two-stage rockets.

 
Even without a special payload section, you can see that Janus II is taller than Janus I - this is because since it's made to take larger (and heavier) motors, which sit in the aft end, the rocket needs to be either longer or weighted in the nose in order to be stable without using oversized fins. This has to do with the relationship between the center of gravity and center of pressure, and if you're new to rockets, we'll get to that in another post on the basics of rocket stability.

Also notice that Janus I has four fins on the booster and main body (sustainer) of the rocket, while Janus II has only 3. This reduces drag and increases altitude (and makes building faster - less sanding and fewer fin fillets to apply). My simulation estimates that Janus II will top 1700 feet.

But just to check, I also have an altimeter.

Altimeter Two, from Jolly Logic

This tiny little guy will tell me what the peak altitude reached is, and a number of other flight data points - such as top speed, maximum acceleration up to 23 Gs (!!), altitude at parachute ejection and the velocity at which it descends (with that parachute). It's can go up to 29,500 feet, so I think it'll do the trick.

Here's the camera seated in the Janus II payload bay:

Peekaboo!

So, this rocket will carry two payloads - the camera and the altimeter - it has enough room for both, plus an egg if I wanted to do that (though I'd like to spare my new altimeter the potential humiliation).

The Quadrunner is in pretty good shape, considering the ordeal I blogged about a few days ago. It's not perfect, but once the decals are on, the little flaws may not be noticeable.

The Quest Quadrunner -
tall, powerful, beautiful...

With four C6 motors, this should easily top 2000 feet, although I may add a bit of weight just to slow it down a bit. Four motors can lift a lot of weight. This rocket is not that heavy - and in a recent Youtube video I saw of a launch, the thing took off so fast the camera couldn't keep up. After a month and a half of work, I'd prefer to minimize the risk of my losing this rocket on its maiden voyage.

The Nautilus II by 3D Rocketry will get copper fins and perhaps nose cone, although I'm tempted to leave it this flat black color. It looks imposing like this.

But I got the copper paint, so I feel like I should go through with it. I hope I don't regret that decision! The rocket flies on a D motor, and should go pretty high.

We're also going to attempt to launch Chad's Aspire rocket from Apogee Components. This thing is supposed to top one mile in altitude. Last time we launched, I must have inserted the igniter wrong (it's a composite motor, not black powder, and I'm not used to those yet), because it flashed, and nothing happened. Such a disappointing end! I have four spare igniters for this rocket, so we'll try our best. We'll probably never see it again...

I was going to hold back on a few of my smaller rockets, but I realized, hey, this is the last launch of the year! I should go all out! So I'm launching everything I've got - everything I've built, that is. My pre-made, ready-to-fly models will probably stay at home, or I'll launch one first to check the wind direction and speed.

But here's nearly everything I built myself since I started doing this less than six months ago - the fleet for tomorrow's launch:

Back row: Janus II, Cosmic Explorer (Estes), Nautilus II (3D Rocketry), Aspire (Apogee Components), Magnum Sport
Loader (Quest Aerospace), Big Bertha (Estes), Quadrunner (Quest Aerospace). Middle row: High Flier (Estes),
Crossfire ISX (Estes), Der Red Max (Estes). Front row: Star Trooper (Estes), Mini Honest John (Estes)

Janus I is retired, due to damage, but everything else I've built is going into the sky tomorrow, and I hope to have pictures and video to share - including POV video from the nose of the Janus II!

The weather looks good, so we shouldn't have to scrub the launch like we did Saturday. Honestly, I was glad for a few more days to finish these three rockets, but now it's Go Time.

I've been putting together a video compilation for a few weeks of all my launches - or, at least, all the ones that came out OK, and after tomorrow, I'm going to put a Slo-Mo Supercut on my Youtube channel. Rocket porn, basically. Now that I'm building bigger rockets, I hope to get some good video. Small rockets are really impressive to watch in person - they go so high so fast! But on video, it's hard to convey the exciting nature of the launch. Bigger rockets look better on video.

If I stick with this (I plan on it), I think I'll try to make it an annual tradition of putting out a slo-mo launch supercut of the year on January 1. I've got some bigger rockets to build, so hopefully years to come will see some good video - and who knows, maybe a Level 1 high power rocket certification launch??

Three Nearly Finished Rockets

I've been working on a couple of posts for a few days now - including the long-promised "Launching Your First Rocket (For N00bs)" post, plus one on the financial cost of starting out in rocketry. These are taking a while, so I thought I'd do a quick post to show you what I've been up to, rocket-wise.

Last weekend, I had two days off in a row. Due to the nature of my job, this never happens. I got so much rocket stuff done last weekend - it was awesome! The only regret is that I had to scrub a launch, because Chad wasn't available, and we wanted to launch his Apogee Aspire rocket.

Well, first of all, Orion was awesome!

I was at work, and we watched a bit there - missed the launch by ten minutes, but we did see the splashdown. I'd never seen a capsule splash down in real time; I grew up in the Shuttle era.

I finished the 3D Rocketry Nautilus II build - with the exception of attaching the nose cone to the shock cord. I like to finish painting first. The rocket is primed, but not painted:

I love the way a rocket looks when it's primed. It looks solid, serious, and like it's one
piece. I'm sometimes tempted to leave the thing gray and have that be its final color.

I also finished Janus II, my second two-stage design with a camera payload bay. This isn't even primed. All I need to do now is prime and paint it, then attach the nose to the rocket, and it's time to shoot some awesome POV launch videos.

Initial drilling out of the camera well with a Dremel tool

Attaching fins to both the booster and sustainer stages

The camera bay - this will be painted matte black

The completed rocket. It's my tallest one so far.

This payload bay has enough space to take
an altimeter as well - need to get one of those!

I can't wait to see how this performs - and to get video back!

I'll post the complete build soon, so you can see how I went from design to construction - and then to launch! If I can get this painted, we'll launch it on December 27 - along with Chad's Aspire.

I also started designing a camera chase rocket that I hope to launch with the Janus II, in order to get some interesting footage.

This rocket is intended to have a camera in the nose pointed skyward, and to chase the Janus II. I don't know if I'll get around to building it, or if it will even work - model rockets are unguided, so there's no guarantee the two rockets will even go in the same direction - but my hope is to see a vertical POV from this rocket of the Janus II slowly pulling away as is flies higher. Maybe next spring you'll see something interesting on the Youtube channel.

Finally, I got the Quad Runner, a 4-motor cluster rocket by Quest Aerospace, nearly assembled. This gave me a bit of anxiety, due to the compound fins, but it's looking good, and I'm working on fin fillets at the moment.

FOUR MOTORS AT ONCE!!

Love that Guillotine Fin Jig!

I just love the way this looks

This rocket is looking so beautiful.

I think Quest estimates the altitude of this rocket at 2400 feet - I'll have to take care not to lose it, as it's been weeks building for me! Again, I'll post on this build in the future.

Now, if only I can get these painted, these will be some great-looking rockets!

Oh, and I unpacked one of my new mid power rockets - the Estes Pro Series II Leviathan. The thing is freaking huge! I want to get building it, but I need to seek some construction advice, as I plan to make a few changes for strength, performance, and cosmetic reasons. And I need to build something to launch it from. This rocket is heavier than my others, and uses a 29mm motor - much bigger than what I've used so far.

A 29mm AeroTech reloadable motor casing, with an Estes C6-5 18mm motor in the foreground. The C6-5 is the
most powerful motor I've launched with so far, but I've built several rockets that use something larger. I just
need to get them out to the launch pad to see how they do!

Instead of using a plain metal launch rod, I may try to construct a launch rail - something higher power rockets use, as it's much sturdier.

The nose cone of the Leviathan is nearly the size of my head!

It's after 2 a.m. Bed time for Bonzo...

So Much Rocket Stuff Coming Up...

Rocketry is so fascinating, and I've got so many ideas for this blog, I kind of don't know where to start. I'm working on three new rockets right now - two kits and one scratch-built - and I barely got any of that done today.

Yesterday, I spread all my rocket stuff on the dining room table to take a picture for this blog - and it was a mess! I have a ton of stuff, and just ordered more stuff from JonRocket.com, and a new midpower rocket - the Quest Aerospace Big Dog - from Amazon.

This rocket is over 32 inches tall, and apart from the cheesy name, I really like the looks of it. It will by my third Quest kit - the first being the Magnum Sport Loader, and the second, which I'm just about to start building, being the Quad Runner - a four-motor cluster that I'm really excited about!

The Magnum Sport Loader was my first cluster - that's a rocket which uses more than one motor side by side, and they are so cool! Here's the video:

Check out the flame on that thing!! That's only two motors. The Quad Runner has four, which, I predict, will be freaking awesome.

I'm also building a sequel to the Janus I - the Janus II, another two-stage rocket. This one will have larger motors - one D and one E - and will go much higher. I'm also designing it to carry a camera payload:

This teeny-tiny cheap video camera will look down the body of the rocket at the ground as
the rocket launches into the sky - and will hopefully see the first stage fall away!

The Janus I prototype had to be retired, guys... While attempting to put the two stages back together for display, I snapped off one, then two fins from the booster.

GAAAAAAAAARRRHHHHH!!!!

Also, the body tube of the sustainer - the main part (second stage) of the rocket - did get some damage in flight. And while repairing the broken fins, I saw that the centering rings in the sustainer had been pushed in - probably while I was trying to get the two stages together for the first flight, since I got things glued in slightly the wrong spot, and there was a tiny gap between the two stages. I pushed hard to get them together!

I got the fins glued on, and the rocket back together. I could try to fly it again, but this was a test model for me. It's going to sit in a place of honor as my first successful design. And I'll have a future post where I'll show you how I built it - and will show the changes I'm making to Janus II.

Sad little fin - still, check out the airfoil on that baby!

Here's an OpenRocket screenshot of the Janus II with the camera payload bay (you'll have to imagine where the camera is in this picture):

Finally, I'm also currently building the Nautilus II by 3D Rocketry. This was the first non-Estes kit I bought, but I'd held off building it until now. But it's cool looking!

Also, if I can stop spending all my rocket funds on kits and parts each week, I'm planning on joining the National Association of Rocketry soon - and perhaps find a club (or... start one?). I think it's an important next step for me.

So, upcoming on the blog:

• Rocket motor basics (there are lots of resources on this subject, but I think I should address it before moving on)
• Rocket stability basics (ditto)
• Rocket safety and the NAR code (you can find this everywhere, but I am starting to feel like I have a responsibility to at least write something about it)
• Launching Your First Rocket (For N00bs) - a follow up to the Skill Level 1 Building the Big Bertha series of posts
• A post on designing a really simple rocket and building it from scratch - so any rocket n00bs out there reading this will see that it can be done!
• Pictures of my current and future builds
• A new regular segment - N00b Mistakes - where I show you some things I've screwed up on some of my builds, and what I've done to correct them
• What's in my toolbox?
• A few cool tools you can make for yourself
• Building technique videos
• More launch videos (which means I gotta go launch some more rockets soon!)

Wow. That seems like a lot, now that I've written it down... But I enjoy doing this.

Some of this stuff might just be turned into pages in the sidebar so new readers can find it easily, and more experienced rocketeers who stumble upon this blog won't need to bother with it if they don't want to.

I have gotten some nice feedback on this blog lately, which is really nice. When I started writing it, I had no idea what it was going to be about, other than my own rocket building experience. The other day, I actually got a subscriber!

Oh, I nearly forgot! If you'd like to keep up with posts on this blog, please go to the Rocket N00b Facebook page - facebook.com/rocketn00b.

I hope you'll continue to enjoy reading this as I've enjoyed writing it.