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~$5 worth of damage.

Date:  29th October 2011, 8:30am - 11:30am
Location: Doonside, NSW, Australia
Conditions:  Calm, mild and overcast, ~25C
Team Members at Event: John K and GK

During the week I made up 6 new 90mm spliced pairs of bottles, as we had just about run out of the old ones. I used the asymmetric splice #5 technique for these, but simplified one step in the procedure and that was to make the reinforcing strip out of a bigger 2L bottle. This allowed me to overlap the strip on the smaller diameter bottle, and was able to glue it all in one step, rather than making up a separate patch as in step 28 in the described procedure. This of course only works for smaller bottles. For splicing 2L bottles you would still need the patch.

Doonside Launch

This weekend dad was in Adelaide so I only took a couple of the smaller rockets to the NSWRA launch at Doonside. You really need two people to help set up and launch the bigger rockets. I flew the Axion IVd rocket with the camera boom that we used a couple of years ago to look at the nozzle. This time we used the HD camera and turned it thr other way and looked at the parachute deployment. Having the camera out on a boom gives you a better perspective, but causes more drag on the rocket. The rocket was flown in this configuration 3 times. All three flights went well, but because it was overcast, as usual the colours get washed out. It also didn't help that the camera was pointing up towards the sun.

I also launched the Axion VII rocket with the jet foaming insert flying in a jet foaming configuration, but because of the very low acceleration, the timer never triggered on launch and the rocket crashed. When I picked up the rocket, the timer was still in the armed state so I tried moving it up quickly and it triggered just fine, and deployed the parachute. I know the Assemtech G-switches always have a range of triggering values and this particular G-switch may be at the upper end of this range. We need to build a test stand to compare the range of triggering G-forces.

We will most likely use the break-wire option on the timer for the very low G launches to make sure the timer triggers. (The reason the break wire option was added in the first place)

The other launches that used water only, at the same pressure and same size nozzle were fine in detecting the launch.

Damage was only minor though, with 3 of the bottles buckled and the nosecone fairing and corriflute framework bent. All the electronics, servo and timer were fine, as were the bottle fairings, tornado couplings and the entire tail section. The cost of repairs is less than $5.

One thing the video looking up finally answered was how we loose our rubber bands from the parachute door. We normally only thread the rubber band through the hole rather than make a knot in it to allow it to stretch evenly, and allow for redundancy if only one side of the rubber band gets released. The other end in that case just comes out through the hole. If you tie a knot in it, after about a week that stretched part of the rubber band will deteriorate and break. In the video you can see that the door flaps back and forth in the air stream after deploy and it shakes the rubber band out. I always thought it was a result of the deploy event.

Also a big thank you goes to Lindsay Handmer for helping me out on the day with rocket setup and launches.

Here is a short highlights video from the day:

NSWRA - Macquarie University Astronomy Open Night

In the evening we helped man the NSWRA stand at the astronomy open night. It went really well with lots and lots of people coming to have a look and chat to the club members about rocketry. I'd say there were close to 200+ people that came to have a look and at times they were a couple of lines deep. Hopefully some of the people who we talked to will attend a Doonside launch or two to see how real rockets fly. We had our Polaron G2 rocket on display as well.

Otherwise the open night was really good for all the other displays, and I even got a chance to go look through some telescopes at night with the kids that the astronomy guys had set up. The kids really enjoyed the night.

I took some photos of the stand just as we were setting up, but once people started arriving it got too busy and I forgot to take more photos.

Other Stuff

The Shadow

The Shadow has also been progressing since the last update. See here for the most recent updates:

YouTube Videos

We've finally decided to bite the bullet and start migrating all the videos from the current YouTube channel to a specific Air Command Water Rockets channel. I've been wanting to do this for quite a while since the existing channel was only ever intended to be a temporary one. We have a number of videos spread across Vimeo, MySpace, YouTube and several other hosts so we will consolidate all these into the single channel. It will be easier to make up playlists of related videos and keep them all organised, especially as they relate to each project. I'm also hoping to upgrade the YouTube channel so we can provide extra features.

The biggest drawback is that the comments from people will be lost, links to the videos will be broken, but if I don't do the migration now, it would just get worse into the future. I am backing up the comments though. Expect videos to start disappearing over the coming weeks/months from our current channel, and they will be re-uploaded to the new channel over time. I will also update the links to the video from this website, or where I can.

Some of the older videos were also uploaded only in lower resolution, so where I can I will re-compress these again at higher resolution before uploading and re-edit some of them where it will help improve them.

If you have been subscribed to our gk123434534 channel and wish to continue receiving subscription updates please subscribe to our new channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/AirCommandRockets

All new videos from now on will also be uploaded to the new channel.

Flight Details