LarryBAR99

The NY Times published a great article last week, " These Rocketry Hobbyists Are Not Just Playing Around ".  I agree! When I was a kid we used to drive from Phoenix to visit my Uncle Larry in Pasadena, California, for summer vacation and our family would go to Disneyland.  Back then, there was a "futuristic" rocket in Tomorrow Land, based on a design by Dr. Verner von Braun.  I'd forgotten about it until we visited my best friend in Kansas City and saw this on the roof of the old TWA headquarters in downtown KC: Old pictures I've seen showed the TWA logo on either side of this Moonliner rocket. When we got back, I started looking for ways to build this rocket!  There was a company offering a model of the Moonliner, but they stopped producing them because of family health issues.  Then I heard about the Washington Aerospace Club's 2025 Moonliner project to build a 30 inch diameter, 22 foot tall Moonliner !  They successfully launched their monster in Sep...

Long time, no post ....  Here's some of what I've been up to in the past few months: Estes surprised everyone (at least me) when they announced at the end of July that they were selling a 4" diameter  Pro Series II™ Mega Der Red Max™ Model Rocket , using a 3-Engine Cluster.  I anguished for a couple of weeks about whether to buy one and they sold out before I decided to buy one.  I should have recognized the "Limit 2" next to the order button meant they hadn't made a lot of them. After a month or so had passed, I saw someone on The Rocketry Forum  discussing 3D printing the Mega DRM so I reached out to "frogglicker" (David Frey) who generously shared the STL files he'd developed .  He designed a custom 2 piece nose cone for me, based on a file I made with OpenRocket.  Estes was selling the 4" body tube used in the Mega DRM so I bought two (just for fun and possible future projects ). OpenRocket simulation of my Mega Der Red Max in flight w...

Well, I haven't been doing much rocketry so far this year.  We've spent a lot of time babysitting our grandson, watching him for almost two weeks while his parents were out of the country earlier this year.  We took road trips to visit friends in South Carolina, Georgia and Minnesota.  We spent a long weekend visiting our daughter in Philadelphia this summer.  I've also discovered sourdough, isolating my own starter in March and regularly baking bread and other things with sourdough discard (English muffins, bagels, flatbreads, crackers, etc.).  I've also made fresh baguettes using sourdough starter, which turns into an all day project! I've been reprinting several copies of my four color license plate frame after the one I made for my wife melted when the car was parked in direct sunlight.   It took several tries, but I've substituted black PETG for the black PLA used to build the main part of the license plate.  PETG withstands higher temperatures th...

Well, it's been an exciting year.  In addition to becoming a grandfather and going to half-time at work, I started the year learning to use my new 3D printe r .  I've used the printer to build rockets that are no longer available, learned how to combine my OpenRocket skills to 3D print novel or experimental rockets as well as printing things for my wife's gardening hobby, printing things inspired by her love of the Grateful Dead and printing things for my daughters.  For Halloween, some of our neighbors had rats (we think it's caused by the construction of Northwestern's new football/concert stadium) so we were asked by our Village not to put out real pumpkins.  As a solution, I 3D printed a Grateful Dead-themed Halloween pumpkin: I'm currently printing a (late) Grateful Dead-themed Christmas present for my wife.  This is my first four color 3D print, based upon what I learned printing multicolor coasters for Valentine's Day for my wife.  This involves pri...

OpenRocket simulation of my boosted Space Shuttle in flight Back when I was a BAR99 (born-again rocketeer in 1999) I built and launched an Estes #1284 Space Shuttle  in October 1999.  It was a complicated kit, with 54 steps.  The final rocket flew on a C6-3 to about 200 feet then the shuttle separated and sort of glided back to the ground, with the main rocket recovered with its own 18" parachute.  I flew it successfully a couple times and is still on my shelf.  Estes sold this kit from 1976 to 1998, and it's occasionally available now for exorbitant fees on eBay and elsewhere. I've been intrigued by something Apogee Components released a couple of years back that allows us to attach booster rockets to a main rocket that will fall away after from the main rocket after their booster engines are exhausted.  The original Estes Space Shuttle used the "boosters", which were glued on, to hold stabilizing fins that could be removed for display but provided noth...

In my excitement about working on the X-Wing  I forgot to describe my other project after fixing my printer nozzle.  I stumbled across Luna (from Destination Moon) model rocket by Works-Of-Claye on Thingiverse.  It's a small rocket, using a B or C engine, but the author admits he hadn't flown it at the time he shared the files.  I was attracted to this rocket because it was featured in the 1950 movie, Destination Moon  and I'm a sucker for retro looking SciFi rockets (like the Silver Comet ). I made some modifications to what the author's design, including adding a base to the nose cone in Thingiverse so it slipped into the body tube instead of having to clamp onto the top of the body tube.   Using Tinkercad to add a base for the nose cone I also modified the gcode for the lower body to pause and change filaments to print red tips on the fin pods .  I printed the baffle and a screw on 18 mm engine retainer using PETG for heat resistance. Printing the ...