Me and my buddies pooled our money for a car battery, then wired a box full of switches on the back of a Radio Flyer so we could send up six at once, except weird Ben's rockets, he had to launch his by himself because his never flew straight so we all had to hide when he launched his.

My favorite was an Astron Drifter, sanded smooth as glass with a candy burgundy finish. Flew it over 40 times until on a dare I loaded it with a B-3-6 and two 18" 'chutes. Never saw it again.

Estes Rockets were the very coolest thing. A month's paper route money would buy enough rocket motors for an Uber-Geekin' Weekend. (or was that Freakin' Geekin' Weekend?)

I'm welling up and waxing nostalgic for my slide rule with that one. Thank-you.

Quite Sincerely,

Nitro and I had great fun the past few years building rockets and such...

I made a Big Bertha and attached whistles to it! When it goes up it sounds so cool, then as it speed up during decent it also sounds off. Really neat. kinda like a buzz bomb.

I also made a 2 stager, and used a long delay on the secondary engine fire... heh, it would tend to shoot the second stage horizontal! Very dangerous but super cool.

D ENGINES ROCK!

i started with just a rinkydinky 1-stage rocket w/o even a parachute

it went up about 150' then fell back down - usually into the mud

i eventually graduated (read: got more money) to an X-10, you remember right? the one with the 110 camera in it? hehe, never got a good shot of anything though

picked up one with the transparent plastic tube and shot some bugs up about 300' or so a few time, until the sucka' got caught in a tree i was never able to get it down

one of my last adventures in rocketry was a scale Saturn IV, all stages complete with parachutes and rockets, including the breakaway tower at the top!

a total of 7 D engines, and successivly smaller ones as the stages got smaller, with an engine i ferget how small, but it was really tiny, for the tower at the top

this rocket was nealry 6 FEET tall and about 23lbs when i finished it, and it took allll summer to build

freinds and i took it out to a field and hooked a car battery to it, since the wimpy 12v one that came with the kits i had over the previous few summers just wasn't enough to light 5 D engines

well, i lit it off, and MAN WHAT A SIGHT! :O 5 d engines makes a LOT of smoke! i was amazed it actually took off! the 1st stage burned out at what i estimated to be 250', then it fell off and the parachute opened and the second stage lit -
the 2nd stage went probably to 650' (guessing again) and that was the last i saw of the whole thing

i lost sight of it in the sun and never saw it again
i was so excited i fergot to note where the 1st stage went and lost track of it too

the tower was supposed to blow off after the 1st stage seperated, but i never noticed if it did and with the air pressure at the front of the rocket, it probably didn't

as far as i can tell , if everything went as planned, the capsule would have hit at least 2400' i guess i should have put some kind of transmitter in each part to track it all, but hey, i was 14 and didn't have the ca$h, or the brain power to think of that at the time

i fired off a few more *much smaller rockets after that, but since losing such an investment i really didn't wanna do it anymore

these days, i don't think the FAA (or the FBI!) would appreciate a rocket of any kind imposing on their airspace - they might take it as a REAL rocket and send a squadron of F-16's to shoot it down! lol

oh yeah - and this wasn't the estes saturn iv rocket, i built it myself the estes version was (and still is) too expensive (you can get 'em on ebay if you want)

I've also tried MightyJoe's idea, but with a twist. Kids, don't try this at home

- take an x-acto knife or screwdriver and remove the ejection plug at the back of the rocket engine, leaving the ejection charge exposed.
- stuff two or three firecrackers, fuse down, into the barrel.
- tape a stick or dowel about 1.5" long to the engine, point down. It should look like a big bottle rocket.
- pull a fuse from a firecracker and use it to light the sucker.

For valentines day with my last long term SO I decided that we should do something special that would be lots of fun... so of course model rockets came immediately to mind. Admittedly, perhaps winter here is not prime rocket launching weather. However he could have been a bit more excited about the idea... maybe even *try* it. Oh well.

Also fun is extreme water rocketry. Take a plastic coke bottle (or washing up liquid bottle), fill around 2/3 to 3/4 with water, insert a bung with air hose into the open end (ideally a rubber bung, like you get in science labs, although you can make do with a cork) and pump up with a car tyre pump (or an actual car tyre for a more automated launch).

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Originally posted by greycat:
We used to have a water rocket when I was a kid. It was a store-bought thing, made of translucent colored plastic, and about 6 inches tall. It came with a hand pump and the connectors were shaped properly so that it all fit together properly. I don't remember what happened to it.

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Geordie: Are you nuts? What if you hesitated an instant too long with the shot and had engine exhaust shoot down your arm? I hope you at least wore goggles and big grill or oven mitts.

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Originally posted by quantumfluff:
Geordie: Are you nuts? What if you hesitated an instant too long with the shot and had engine exhaust shoot down your arm? I hope you at least wore goggles and big grill or oven mitts.[/B]

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Originally posted by Geordie:
Certainly that wasn't as dumb as sledding down the roof for example.

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Originally posted by quantumfluff:That does take imagination. Was there at least a snow bank up the side of the house up to the roof? Or, did you just intend to speed down and plummet off the edge?

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Hmm, snow that would have been a good idea, but it was in June and we don't have snow in Virginia that time of year. It was off a tin roof on a one story barn. I think I did something to make a safer landing area, but I can't recall what it was. The weird thing is I only seem to break bones and stuff when I am doing normal things.

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Originally posted by quantumfluff:
Your story did remind me of something my cousin did. I wish I could claim credit for this. He built air to air missles for his friend's RC plane. He designed an ignitor receiver that he could trigger over an RC channel, mounted a hard sharp nose cone and fins on engines and put one under each wing. Then you could have a real dogfight. He later built working depth charges for RC boats.

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