Greetings from New Zealand

[Muzza]

Hi, I got into water rockets thru having a play with an Aquapod launcher that my brother had bought for his kids. From that I ended up buying one (for my kids), but pretty quickly found it's limitations (full bore nozzle, Inbuilt safety valve set at 60psi) so have moved on from there.
Mainly using construction techniques from Aircommand (thanks George, awesome site) the latest rocket is about 6 litre total volume ( 2x spliced pairs + a single bottle joined with tornado tubes) with a gardena type nozzle, running at 100-110psi. Parachute is deployed via a tomy timer using an air flap to detect launch. So far have flown it 6 times with 6 deployments, so all good.
Altitude is a bit unknown as an altimeter is the next thing I'm looking at adding.
I have flown a camera (MD80 clone) on the last 3 launches, but it was all out of focus. I have re-focused the camera and am just awaiting another launch window (The downside of living in Wellington aka Windy Wellington is sometimes its a long wait for a still weekend)

Been having a great time so far with water rockets, and the kids are still interested enough to want to come to launches

Muzza

[Brian]

Do you have some pictures?

[air.command]

Hi Muzza, Glad to hear you are having fun with water rockets as well! I'm not sure what the weather patterns are like in your local area, but we find that just after dawn are usually the calmest conditions. If you need to launch in windy conditions, don't make the rocket over-stable so that it doesn't weather-cock too much on the way up, and use the smallest parachute that will bring your rocket back safely but won't drift too far.

Like Brian said, please share some pictures of your rockets.

- George

[Muzza]

Just took some pictures, now to figure out how to insert them here

wide shot

6L rocket 001-400.jpg (12.45 KiB) Viewed 20 times

Payload

6L rocket 004-400.jpg (11.28 KiB) Viewed 20 times

deploy mech

6L rocket 002-400.jpg (12.18 KiB) Viewed 20 times

business end!

6L rocket 005-400.jpg (10.47 KiB) Viewed 20 times

[Muzza]

And a very short launch video
http://s1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii6 ... launch.mp4

not sure if i've done that right

[Brian]

Looking good!
Hope you get the onboard camera focusing right

[Muzza]

Just back from flying that particular rocket for the last time! Awesome flight right up to the point of non-deployment of the parachute Guess I'll never know if I had the focus on that camera right or not, because it's now a bit sick. Memory card now won't latch into the camera (ejected on impact) and all there is of today's flight is a file of 0 byte size. The power light is still on on the camera, but it won't turn off.
Trialled a foam system on this flight, very spectacular, dunno about performance wise, but painted an awesome white trail against the blue sky. (video coming soon)

Muzza

[Muzza]

Sorry about the poor filming, still getting the hang of filming and watching at the same time. Didn't capture the decent or the impact, filmed pictures of my feet and the ground instead
http://s1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii6 ... flight.mp4