Hi Guys,
a few photos to add to those Daniel posted on Facebook, which do, I hope, capture a flavour of yesterday's rocket flying. First, here are Daniel and Max (who took those photos - well done! Daniel is holding his T-38, which coped well with the tricky conditions and made some great flights:
Next, here is Daniel launching his Sharky:
Built from a jetex.org kit, it is nicely finished in Russian, not RAF (
), markings:
It flew very well with a variety of Rapier L-2 motors.
I too had a good time:
This was a great flight, but on the next the T-38 was shot down by turbulence, made a hard arrival and the nose broke off. But this is easily repaired on these tough profile models.
Daniel's launch style is a bit different from mine:
on this occasion it turned to the right. A quick (straight) relaunch gave a great sortie.
Here are the models Daniel and Max brought:
I'don't think the Alpha Jet or the Hunter made a flight. The Viper flew well with an L-2X but spectacularly with an L-2 '120 mN', which is nominally of lower thrust.
We had two other rocketeers, John Woodham (left) , who flew his new Wren very nicely indeed, and only occasionally into a tree, and Michael Kneale, purveyor of Jetex to the gentry on the OW stalls. Michael was flying genuine Jetex with an adapted all sheet chuck glider, which was somewhat overpowered by the Jetex 50C.
Other highlights of the day were finding a full tin of viable Jetex fuse at a very reasonable price (thank you, Michael) and finding that the three different batches of
18-year old Rapier L-2 motors a kind person gave me still worked, and propelled my replica Veron T'Bird Quicky very well indeed
Above: The T'Bird coped with the conditions very well and allowed me to compare the thrusts of three packs of very old Rapiers with a 2-year old Rapier L-2LT. Note this one is in a brown case, and, like the green cased L-2's of similar vintage, has a diameter 0.3 mm greater than current red-bodied motors. I make my motor mounts bigger these days to accommodate this.
And that's about it. Sunday's weather promised storms, so I rested up.