The trip to Black Rock

This years trip to Balls19 was a great year for successful rocket launches, but different as far as travel there and back was concerned.  First of all our group was divided by those flying and those driving.  Not a big thing in the grand scheme of things, however a change in the dynamic never the less.  Those driving had a surprise when our axles for the trailer came off 400 miles from our destination.  In the middle of the night, in the middle of Nevada we heard a loud thump and a bit of a jerk like we had ran something over.  When we went out to check the tires we found out that the trailer was missing a complete axle and the other one was askew.  As we were outside checking things on the side of the interstate someone stopped to tell us the axle was in the passing lane a ways behind.  We called highway patrol to inform them of the matter and pulled forward a quarter mile to  get to an exit and to see the mile marker to better locate the hazard in the road.  After we spoke to the highway patrol someone else pulled up to let us know they saw the axle and moved it out of the roadway. (Whew!)  After locating another trailer to rent, towing assistance, and a weld shop where we could leave it for repairs we headed back the 30 miles out of town to the trailer on the side of the highway.

When going to transfer equipment from the damaged trailer to the rented trailer so the trailer could be loaded onto the flatbed, we found out that the axle had been stolen from the median of the interstate.  We had the weld shop mount the only axle we had and lightened the trailer on the return trip.  After a 14 hour delay we were back on our way to Black Rock.

Trailer photos by Tom Tweit.

Trailer being loaded onto flatbed after finding out the other axle was stolen.

This year we had driving the bus and the trailer out to Black Rock, Brian Elfert, Tom Tweit, Tim Covey, Dave Leininger, and myself.  Flying out to Reno and renting an RV then driving to Black Rock was Gary Stroick, Gerald Meux, and Steve Anderson.

Once on the playa we connected with Gene Nowaczyk, Craig Snyder, Mark Brown, as well as the Tripoli Southern Minnesota group with Richard Hagensick, Ron Freiheit, Andy Limper, Carl Hasbargen, and others.

Balls19

The weather this year out on the playa was the best that anyone has seen in years, great weather for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with the wind coming up a little on Sunday shortly after noon.  Even then the wind was just the normal breeze you get from heating and only blew up the dust that was disturbed by driving around the camp.

This year Team UMERG put up only tried and true rockets with nothing really pushing the envelope, this being said all flights were successful except for Tim Covey’s rocket ‘Hybrid 4-5′ which appears to have suffered damage from a previous launch attempt.  It appears that the nitrous was bleeding off as fast as it was going in, leaving it essentially empty when attempting the launch.

Steve Anderson had a great launch on an N1900, got video of this flight from back on the flight line in the video at the bottom.

Big Yeller, Team UMERG’s project

Big Yeller, UMERG's group project taking off the pad

Big Yeller on a Pitch Black Sparky motor

Spike

I had the opportunity to launch a motor in my rocket that from start to finish I did everything, design, mixing, etc.  Working with the UMERG team I had helped mix motors for the last 5 years.  This time was the first that I has gone through all of the steps to work it through, going from a small ‘G’ test motor and scaling it to a near full ‘M’ motor.

Rob Grygar's Spike on an Everclear M motor

Tripoli Southern Minnesota’s ‘Miss September’

The TSM group launched their rocket ‘Miss September’, a two stage huge rocket with a ‘P’ motor in the booster and a ‘P’ motor in the sustainer.

Graphic for Miss September

Tripoli Souther Minnesota's 'Miss September'

Both Andy Limper and Ron Freiheit launched their 2 stage rockets as well, I captured Andy’s flight on the video at the bottom.

72,000 ft flight

Curt Newport and Jeff Taylor launched Proteus 6.5 off of the UMERG launch pad to 72,000 ft.  The flight was perfect with both telemetry and a camera.  Proteus captured a wonderful photo at apogee.  Congratulations Curt & Jeff.

Curt Newport preping the camera on Proteus 6.5

72,000 ft. with Pyramid lake 50 miles away.

Tim Covey’s ‘Hybrid 4-5′

Tim Covey made an attempt to launch his rocket called ‘Hybrid 4-5′ on Saturday of Balls, and the rocket went just off of the rail then fell down to the side of the pad.  Tim said the rocket was miss fueled and the tank was empty.  He was able to get more nitrous and worked to get the rocket prepped for Sunday.  On Sunday the rocket went a little higher and just seemed to hover for a few seconds, then fell to the side of the pad once again.  Upon inspection later Tim was able to find out that on a previous misfire a crack developed that he was not able to see which allowed the nitrous to boil off as fast as it was coming into the tank.

Tim Covey, Craig Snyder, Gary Stroick, & Bruce Lee.

Here is a link to a video that shows our launches as well as those of others we were able to capture.

Balls19 2010

The Umerg team L to R, Greg Oseid, Gary Stroick, Rob Grygar, Dave Leininger, Steve Anderson, Bill Assimies, Tom Tweit.

The UMERG team (Upper Midwest Experimental Rocketry Group) traveled to launch our rocket, Locomotive Breath, at the Tripoli Rocketry Association’s Research rocketry launch, BALLS, on the Black Rock dry lake bed, in NW Nevada, near Gerlach.  The trip out was fantastic, without any mechanical problems, and the weather & driving was great.  We made probably our best time traveling out to this launch on this trip.

With that being said, the rest of the time was interesting to say the least.  We had colder weather than anyone recalls, and wind, which you expect at the Black Rock; but adding the cold to the wind made the trip memorable.  Saturday’s launch was scrubbed at about 1 pm because of the wind.  Temps plummeted overnight to the teens or low twenties, causing trouble with many of the large projects which spent the night on the pad.  Apparently, even though it warmed up a bit on Sunday, the batteries were still cold enough to loose much needed power for staging and deployment charges.  Sunday afternoon’s weather was not much better, with occasional snow squalls randomly moving through the area.  Snow & ice in the mountains east of Salt Lake City made for a white Knuckle drive on the return trip.

UMERG’s high altitude project, ‘Locomotive Breath’, was launched on Friday like many of the projects were, as reports of the upcoming bad weather created a sense of urgency.  The rocket screamed off of the pad much more aggressively than any of us had expected, only to rapidly shred in the air at about three seconds into the flight.  The longest portion of time for the flight, was all of the “rocket rain” fluttering or spinning down in an elongated debris field.

After analyzing the wreckage, it appears that a weld in the aluminum fin to the base flange, may have had a flaw that could not be seen.  The result was a spectacular, but disappointing flight.  Sometimes the things that go wrong are more interesting to watch than the rockets that perform as they should.  It has been said, “You only learn from your mistakes, not your successes”.  Next time we will be using a bolted fin design.  Analysis is still in progress to improve motor performance.

Locomotive Breath at Launch, about 3 seconds before the shred.

Immediately below is a link to a video of the launch and ‘Death Dance’ of Locomotive Breath.

Locomotive Breath

Here is a collection of videos from Balls that you may enjoy.  The videos, ‘UMERG Balls18‘, and ‘Various flights Balls18‘, show a collection of video clips from the UMERG team, and other flights that were videoed.  The videos with the individual rocket names are full length footage of the rocket flight, as much as I could get.

UMERG Balls18

Skydancer III Balls18

Spike Balls18

T2 Balls18

Heads Up Balls18

Cross-eyed Mary Balls18

Lightspeed Balls18

Robert DeHate 2 Stage Balls18

Tim Covey O Hybrid Balls18

And below is a compilation video of rockets that were not with our group, but I had the ability to capture them here.  If you flew at Balls18, you may see your rocket here.     enjoy.

Various Flights Balls18

Well the group has been hard at work getting ready for our trip to Balls18 in the Black Rock Desert, out on the playa of the Black Rock dry lake bed.  Brian and Tom have been getting the bus ready for the long trip.  Many of the group have been active in mixing propellant for test motors, beer keg rocket, and today the mixing is for Locomotive Breath.

Below are some photos of the group working on Locomotive Breath.  I have photos of this because this is the project where my time has been focused.  If anyone in the group has been taking pictures while working on ‘Cross Eyed Mary’ or the bus, let’s get them posted.  The photos are not representative of everyone who worked on this project, only the those who happened to still be around when we thought of taking a picture.  Enjoy.

Dave Leininger laying out pieces before we started working on them.

Steve Anderson tapping a miriad of holes.

Gary Stroick, Wayne Johnson, and Tom Tweit with motor casing/lower airfram after all holes are tapped.

Coupler

Electronics Bay before being turned on the lathe, welded for us by Jim Brown.

Key Lime Green. Painting before assembly.

Fins now painted yellow, looks like a John Deer. Propellant grains in background.

Below are photos from the ‘Cross-Eyed Mary’ project.

Nose cone being made by Pat Arneson, for 'Cross-Eyed Mary' the beer keg rocket.

Nose cone after creative sanding & some paint.

The keg sits in this part, and the nose cone & threaded rods slide down around the keg to hold it in place.

Booster section of Cross-Eyed Mary, the keg rocket.

For 2009 the UMERG team has two Balls projects.  One is ‘Locomotive Breath’, as in Jethro Tull’s song of the same name.  The other is ‘Cross-eyed Mary’ also going on the theme of Jethro Tull.  You know the tunes will be cranked at launch time.

Locomotive Breath, will be a 6″ minimum diameter ‘P’ project with about 14,000 lbs. of  thrust, flying on a blue propellant.  This will be our “Big” project, going for an altitude of about 70,000 ft, as well as down-link telemetry.

Cross-eyed Mary, will be our entry into the ‘Keg Lofting’ contest.  Three teams will be launching ‘Cornelius’ kegs of ‘Home Brew’ beer.  The final rules are still being hammered out, but it will all be in fun anyway.

Another favorite that may also take to the sky, is the return of ‘The Flying Red Bull Table of Death’.

There is rumor that Rob Grygar’s rocket ‘Spike’ may make a comeback in time for the Balls trip.  Stay tuned.

Stay tuned for more on these projects, as this post will probably be updated as time goes on.  Below are some photos of Locomotive Breath’s nozzle carrier/rear retainer and it’s graphite insert.

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Today, August 23, 2009, the UMERG team tested an ‘L’ motor with the propellant that will be used in Locomotive Breath.  The motor tested is a scaled down version of the larger motor.  Locomotive Breath’s motor will not be run at as high of pressures as the test motor was.  The test was successful.  Below is a link to the video of the test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBVLkmTyXmY

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The future is bright!  We have a great core group of people who want to build and fly large projects.  We’ll be well represented at a number of the big launches this year, and we have a couple new projects in the works.

Our Fleet for 2009:

• Big Yeller – This rocket has flown several time and will fly again.  When and where are still to be determined, but we’re planning on flying it at our home field in North Branch early in the 2009 Minnesota rocket season.
• Locomotive Breath – This is a brand new project.  We’re planning to fly it at BALLS this year if not before.  It’s a whole lot of motor with some fins and a nose cone thrown in for good measure.
• Flying Red Bull Table of Death – It’s a table, it’s a rocket, watch it fly.
• Yet to be name Keg Lofter

Launches our members are planning to attend:

• Winter Nationals 2009
  (Palm Beach Count, Florida)
• Fire on the Farm 2009
  (Pickrell, Nebraska)
• Rocket Mavericks 2009 International Civilian Space Competition
  (Black Rock, Nevada)
• LDRS 28
  (Penn Yan, New York)
• BALLS 18
  (Black Rock, Nevada)
• Tripoli Minnesota (monthly club launches)
  (North Branch, Minnesota)

Here is a Balls 15 report I dug out of my archives.  Dave Leininger is the prefect of our Tripoli MN prefecture #45.  I hope you will enjoy this report he did for all of the people back in Minnesota who could not go to the event.        Rob. 

BALLS 15 Report:

Well as most of you know myself and a couple of other members of Tripoli MN have been working on a project for BALLS this year. It was a 2 stage rocket with a single use composite cased O motor for the booster and a 4″ minimum diameter sustainer with a Richard Hagensick M 650 engine in it. The following is a short report of the trip, our results and a brief launch report.

The trip there: The original plan was to take the bus that Brian Elfert and several others had been converting over to a travelling Team member/Rocket hauler. Our team that started out with 7 had dwindled off to only Rob Grygar Brian Elfert Tim Covey and myself due to a number of circumstances that were out of our control. Then after hours of hard work put in on the bus by several other team members and myself Brian decided that it wasn’t functional enough to take to BALLS and was going to stay home. Needless to say this put us in quite a bind to come up with a plan B in a hurry. After Rob and I discussed the options we decided to take his van on the trip. Seeing how there were only 3 of us it was quite comfortable and we arrived in the Black Rock desert at about 4pm Thursday afternoon. After we set up and settled in with our camp mates from the Kansas City group we ate a bit and went on with the nightly ritual of campfire propellant burning. I always enjoy this part of the trip almost as much as the rockets and it is a tradition that I’m sure will never die.

Friday: The morning started a bit on the cool side but wasn’t anything like here in Minnesota so it was quite bearable. We still had some work to do so I started right away cooking breakfast when low and behold guess who shows up? Brian. I guess he just couldn’t miss all the action so flew into Reno and rented a car then drove out to the Black Rock. Also joining our group was Richard Hagensick from Wisconsin and his P motor project. Richard also was providing the M motor for our project. After breakfast we got down to business and continued the work on our project. During the day, which was the only commercial launch day, there were very few flights, 3 of them were level 3 cert flights. 2 out of the 3 were not successful but most of the other flights that day were. The day was perfect and everything was landing very close to the launch site. When the launch closed it was off to the frog pond for a relaxing dip in the hot spring, then back for our nightly ritual of fires and propellant burning. During the evening I had took note to the fact that our little area that included team numb from Oregon, Wedge Oldham from California, ourselves and the Kansas City group there was well over 250,000 Newton seconds of thrust. An amazingly huge amount of power. That evening we were joined by some of the heavy hitters in rocketry including such people as Paul Robinson and Jim Rossen of Animal motor works, Wedge Oldham and The record setting Gene Nowaczyk. It’s great to be on the playa at night, not only is the sky one of the most awesome sights you will ever see but the comradery between rocket people is something that you just can’t believe.

Saturday: First up was Richard with his project named RGH’s P Nominal Rocket, 5,4,3,2,1 poof then nothing. Richard had a bit too much thermite and the motor didn’t light. After returning to the campsite from nearly ½ mile away we grabbed one of my triple folded igniters shoved it in and tried again. This time it was 5,4,3,2,1 and wait, wait, there’s the smoke then off the pad it screamed. Richard’ rocket reported back through the downlink telemetry that it had reached apogee at over 46,000 feet for a perfect flight and full recovery. During the day there were many memorable flights including, Wedge’s Nike Ajax on a Q motor, one of the biggest CATO’s I’ve ever seen when team Numb’s Q motor failed 2-3 seconds into the flight, and the biggest and badest Tripoli flight ever when Gene Nowaczyk of Kansas City flew his rocket to over 93,000ft. The highest Tripoli flight ever. We were going for the afternoon high altitude window when the wind came up and we wisely decided to wait until the morning. That didn’t mean the end of the day for us just yet, we had promised Paul Robinson and Robert DeHate they could launch off of our pad with there 2 stage O to N rocket. That flight didn’t quite work as planned when the nozzle decided to blow half of itself out at ignition therefore the rocket was a bit under powered and arced into the wind badly but was recovered though not in the best shape. The day was over so we decided to take another dip in the pond and return for supper and some more fun. Saturday night had some of the biggest propellant burns every witnessed especially with team Numb’s CATO’d Q motor grains.

Sunday: Sunday was the day of carnage, even though Saturday had an almost perfect success rate it was soon back to the typical 50/50 we have come to expect at BALLS. Unfortunately we also added to that when our rocket blew the closures out and burned on the pad. We were able to salvage the sustainer and most of the electronics so it was not a total loss. We did have the most impressive fire though. Shortly after we cleaned up the aftermath of the CATO the wind came up again so we packed it all up and left the playa at about 3pm. We stopped at Bruno’s for a quick bit to eat then on the road again. If you ever make it to Gerlach you have to visit Bruno’s. He has a huge collection of photos from past events including Ky’s space shot, the land speed record setting car, burning man and many other memorable events. We ended the day in Wendover NV and took our time coming home over the next 2 days.

Conclusion: As always it was a trip to remember great time great friends lots of fun fire smoke and best of all we witnessed history being made, heck we were even a part of it. Gene’s record setting rocket launched using our make shift blast defector/ burn pit. I personally wouldn’t have missed it all for the world. I would like to thank everybody involved that made this trip possible, Rob Grygar, machinist extraordinare, Richard Hagensick for providing the M motor, Tom Twiet for his work on the launch tower, Tim Melody his son Collin, Brian Elfert, and Tim Covey for there support. Thanks to all of you and I hope to return next year hopefully with all of you.

Dave Leininger

Prefect Tripoli MN

P.S. pictures to follow