The Mini 29 Rocket
The Mini 29 contains a PerfectFlite altimeter in the nosecone and a Big Red Bee radio transmitter in the payload section. An 18" parachute will be used with this rocket.
Motor retention uses three small eye-screws that are attached to the bottom of the fins. Wire is attached to the eye-screws.
The Rocksim 2D drawing of the Mini 29 is shown below.
8/25/2007, Amateur Rocketeers of Texas Launch, Meek Ranch pictures
1. Estes E9-6 motor. The launch was good. It went straight up and ejection was at apogee. The altimeter indicated an altitude of 1,041 feet. The rocket landed about 500 feet away. I practiced locating the rocket with the tracking transmitter.
2. Road Runner F60-10 motor. The rocket shot off of the launch rod with this motor. No one saw it once got up in the air. The only indication of where it went was from the smoke trail. Several people heard the ejection charge go off, but nobody saw the chute. I was not able to get a signal from the tracking transmitter. I discovered the next morning that I had set the receiver to 434.025 MHz instead of 434.25 MHz. I contacted someone in the Kerrville HAM radio club to see if they could pick up a signal Sunday morning. They contacted me about 10 AM saying they were receiving a signal. I returned to the field Sunday evening at 7:00 PM. After an hour I located the rocket about 1,000 feet west of the launch pad. It was laying on the side of a terrace hill, which made it difficult to pick up a clean signal.
The altimeter recorded an altitude of 3,015 feet. The total flight time was about 220 seconds. The ejection charge went off at apogee at about 12 seconds into the launch. The descent rate works out to about 14.4 feet per second. This is close to the target rate of 15 feet/second, but I may reduce the size of the chute to reduce the time it stays aloft.
9/22/2007, Amateur Rocketeers of Texas Launch, Meek Ranch pictures
3. Estes E9-6 motor. The launch was good. It went straight up and ejection was at apogee. The altimeter indicated an altitude of 1,004 feet. The rocket landed about 300 feet away. I used a 14" nylon parachute on the flight instead of the plastic 18" Estes chute that I used before. This increased the descent rate to about 22.7 fps.
11/3/2007, AARG Launch, Hutto, Texas pictures
4. Aerotech G64-12 reload. I increased the delay by using an HDK-22 delay element. This is a full-length delay element that is 3/4" long. I drilled out 0.05" from the delay element to reduce the delay to about 12 seconds. Once the motor ignited the rocket was gone! The only thing that was visible was the smoke trail. The smoke trail contained some wiggles in it, which indicate that the rocket oscillated as it went up. This was probably due to rod whip.
It took about an hour to locate the rocket using the BeeLine tracking transmitter. It's landed about 1,000 feet northeast of the launch pad, just on the far edge of the line of trees. The altimeter indicated an altitude of 4,086 feet. The rocket descended at a rate of 17 fps instead of 23 fps. This is because the motor casing had ejected, and the rocket was lighter than expected. It took about four minutes for the rocket to descend from 4,000 feet.
The original altitude estimate was 4,800 feet. However, I believe the altitude was reduced by the oscillation caused by the rod whip, and the resulting trajectory that the rocket took. My theory is that the rocket ended up at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees from vertical due to the rod whip. This would cause it to fly about 2,400 feat upwind, and then downwind for 4 minutes under chute. The wind was about four mph, so that in 4 minutes it would have travel about 1,400 feet back toward the pad. Even though the altitude was 4,086 feet instead of 4,800 feet it was still a new altitude record for me.