You've got me beat on build time, but how about the time between prep and flight... In 1997, my Mom gave me two rockets that I had built and finished and prepped, but never flown. They were an Estes Goblin and an Estes Saros. They both had B engines installed in the mount, and the old style igniters installed, the kind where you had to roll the little bit of cotton to hold the wires apart. I went to Toys R Us, got an Estes starter set to get a launcher, changed out the igniters and flew both rockets on their maiden flights successfully. I had built them in 1971, so they were 26 year old engines and 26 years between prep and first flight. You can see me with my SAROS on the front page of the MASA website. Both rockets have flown a number of times since then as well. I wrote reviews of both of them on EMRR as well.
- posted
19 years ago
I figure some might find this amusing.
>
> I found some ancient rocket parts from my youth, a BT5 mated to a BT20
> by a hollowed out balsa transition piece. Obviously I had planned to
> build something that could hold a larger recovery device than a normal
> 13mm powered bird could. So I slapped some fins and a nosecone on it,
> dubbed it the "Retro Rocket", and have had a ball flying it. And it only
> took 35 some years to finish too, that's got to be some kind of record.
> Something else I noticed as I finished the thing. The older BT20s were
> larger than the present ones. Modern plastic nosecones are too small,
> the ID of the body tube is bigger than the cone's OD. Ah well, it should
> have a balsa cone anyway, more thematic.
>
> Chuck
>