A Productive Day In The Shop.

As promised, I did manage to immerse myself into some rocketry projects yesterday.

The first order of business was to facilitate repairs on a couple of birds that got busted up last fall.

The first was the Rascal rocket glider. On its maiden flight, a hard landing broke the fuselage in three places. These are now glued back together and awaiting the application of a strengthening/reinforcement scheme.

In parallel, a new fin for the EAC Viper was fashioned, attached, sealed, and brush painted. I still have to do the masking and painting of the orange and purple areas, but the bird will soon be in shape to fly at the next launch session.

Intertwined with these projects, I also managed to glue on the fins of the Estes Omega sustainer stage. Note the cool LEGO-built cradle.

At the same time, I finished papering the booster fins, which will probably get attached today.

Oh, and the frosty trek to the mailbox paid off. The Estes catalog had indeed arrived!

I haven't sat down and perused it in detail yet, but I'll get to it later today, as well.

Cheers!

"All The Trees Are Brown...."

 "...And the skies are gray..."

                -The Mamas & The Papas

...and it's cold

....and it's icy....

...and there's snow all over the place.

I sorely need a rocket flying fix!

And, since I'm certainly not 'dreaming' of 'California', I might as well just shrug, quit griping, and submerge myself into the  BlastFromThePast basement LaBORatory and glue something up.

I've got more than a few projects in various stages of completion. Will post some progress pics later this week.

Maybe, later today I'll even don the fur parka and the mukluks, trudge out across the frozen tundra to the mail box, and see if the new 2023 Estes catalog has arrived yet.

It's That Time Of Year Again !

 It's hard to believe that it's 2023 already.

Truly, we must have been having fun because time has certainly flown.

As is my wont every January, I do my annual look-back at the previous year's model rocketry activity. So here goes:

I managed to log 43 flights in 2022 spread out over 8 launch sessions, 6 of which took place at Dove Valley Park in Centennial, Colorado.

One of these flights marked my 200th BAR-era launch.

Other highlights included my 1st BAR cluster launch, a launch of some rocket mail, and a few altimeter//vidcam tandem launches.

No models were damaged last year that required relegation to the dust bin, though a few were dinged up enough to earn a spot in the 'repair hangar'.

No models were lost !!

Oddly, the BlastFromThePast shop managed to introduce only four new models to the stable in 2022, three of which were already mostly completed holdovers from the 2021 binge build!

A substantial amount of progress was made on the 2022 binge build, but out of the nine models started, only one was finished and saw some air time.

The remainder of the birds are now part of the new 2022-23 semi-binge build!

So, here are my annual photos of the current flight-worthy fleet:

Let's not forget the birds awaiting repair:

And, finally the in-progress 2022-23 models:

Here's wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year !!