This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Casual flights

While we still work on the bigger rockets, we took the opportunity last weekend to do a few casual flights at the NSWRA launch day. It's always nice to get out and launch a few without having to do a lot of preparation. These rockets were quickly assembled from the set of spare parts we have on hand. We flew the HD camera again on all the flights.

Here is the update: http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day111.htm

Panorama taken from the last flight

Monday, September 19, 2011

The Shadow

Rocket build progress has been continuing at a good pace. We currently have a number of concurrent builds under way. These include the Acceleron V high pressure sustainer upgrade, the Polaron G2 phase 2 booster development and our newest project called "The Shadow".

We have actually been working on The Shadow for a number of months, but hadn't published details about it yet, though we have been taking pictures and keeping a build log of the rocket development. We have now uploaded the build log to our website so you too can follow along with the development. So far it's been an interesting project to work on and has consumed perhaps 60% of our build time.

The project now has its own build page rather than scattering bits of information about it in the various flight log updates. We'll keep the page updated as we go and post the flight reports in the regular updates.

http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/shadow.htm

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Side Deployment Parachute Mechanism Tutorial

It's been a while since the last update, but rocket development has continued. We are currently working on the G2 boosters and have been doing a number of tests. We’ve also been building up our spliced bottle stock pile and spare deployment mechanisms for our rockets. It’s always good to have both components on hand so that we can assemble rockets quickly and have spares when they crash. While making the spare nosecones we took some time to document how we build them.  

The new side deployment mechanism tutorial is mostly based on our previous version. This one incorporates a couple of improvements we’ve been using for a while that makes them easier to build and more reliable.

And a big thank you also goes to Doug from Escape Water Rockets for helping us source some components for the Servo Timer II when the local supplier ran out and was going to take a couple of months to get them back in stock.