My L1 & L2 cert. rocket crashed on it's 11th flight on 7-12-2014 at High Skies. Ouch. It's reparable, but it was nasty. For some reason the drogue didn't deploy. The altimeter shows it firing, but it didn't happen. A short? Hmmm. Anyway, the rocket came in hot and at 700' deployed the main. The main shredded and the rocket was pulled apart because the main acted like a streamer, the case, altimeter, and tracker all survived. The camera glitched at the time of the violent main deployment. Here is a link to a video about the rocket and the end has video from the crash. Oh well, the rebuild begins!
Very Cool! At least you got your money's worth out of it!
Really nice video make up! And excellent music tracks....
REPOST FROM TRF for those who don't read that forum.
OK, I finally had a chance to investigate WHY my rocket failed to deploy the drogue chute and then shredded the main when it deployed at 700'. The SL100 showed the drogue charge being fired at apogee, but the charge was intact when I found it. The picture here shows the short between the wires going to the charge. Grrr. When I built this rocket for my L1 cert. I used some wire that was from a trailer hitch I had in the garage. The wire was NOT the correct wire for this application, but I made it work. Well, the wire finally frayed and caused the short. I use much smaller gauge wire now for my e-bays, and I will be replacing this wire with some nice small single strand wire so this problem doesn't happen again.
(click the link for a pic of the problem)
http://www.rocketryforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=178933&d=1406423257
There is always a reason things don't go as planned and this incident could have been much worse had the main also failed and the rocket been over the flight line. I will definitely be checking my wire connections more closely in the future.
As for the rebuild, it will be complete and ready to fly again in a week or two.
The original "Skyviper"!
NAR #88227
TRA #14358
L1: Madcow "4 Patriot - I284 - 4/7/2013
L2: Madcow "4 Patriot - J350 - 5/5/2013
My Flight Statistics for the Past Year
Number of Flights: 19
- Total: 10,853.75 Ns (6% N)
- Average: 571.25 Ns (79% I)
Altitude
- Total: 77,509 Feet
- Average: 4,079 Feet
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