With the announcement of Rocketfest XVIII, a theme was chosen - "Go Small". The guidelines for the competition was to build the smallest stable flying rocket that used an un-modified Estes motor.

Since the 13mm A3-4 and A10-3 motors are the smallest Estes motors currently in production, this is what I went with. My idea was to create a spool rocket.

I decided to create two - one using a single motor and the other, a cluster of thee motors.

How did they fly? Check out the videos after the jump!

May 5th marked the first launch for the year. It was a nice warm day with little wind - you couldn't have asked for better conditions.

The big launch of the day was Karl's 1/4 scale V2. Karl's working towards building a full 1:1 scale model. The flight was fantastic. Recovery was hampered only by the parachute catching on the guy-wires used to help keep the fins straight.

More photos after the jump

I like small rockets, so building the Fliskits Tumble Weed looked like a lot of fun!

The build is fairly straight-forward with only a handful of parts needed.

Continued after the jump...

Towards the end of 2012, I signed up for the Secret Santa on the Rocketry Forum. During the course of the event, names were swapped and everyone posted off a gift to someone else.
My secret santa arranged for one of Art Applewhite's 10" Clustered flying saucers to be delivered under my tree!

A little while ago I started work on the saucer. The kit comprised of a sheet of foam-core board, some bright green paper and a good selection of tubes. The build was straight-forward and the bulk of the build was completed in a couple of evenings. I didn't document the build.

Here's the final result -

I created custom decals for both the top and bottom of the saucer

Back in November Bill from 3D Rocketry announced his new kit, the Nautilus III
I thought it looked like a super rocket so I contacted Bill and he was happy to post one off to Australia and it arrived within a couple of weeks.

   

First impressions is that this is a good solid kit. The 54mm body tube is solid and has a very tough nose cone. The centering rings are 4mm ply and the fins are 3mm ply. The instructions are straight forward and even describes how to do internal fillets - something that you'll want to do as externally, there's some strips of basswood that go between the body tube and the fins.  

I used an Estes 29mm motor retainer (for the price, these are great value). I swapped out the supplied launch lug for rail buttons and attached the shock cord to the forward centering ring with a screw-eye. 

The kit as it comes is designed to fly on a range of F's but with the quality of the parts supplied, there should be no reason why it won't perform just as well on G's (I'm looking forward to seeing it go up on a G64!!)

As for finishing the Nautilus III, I thought what a rocket would look like if Capt. Nemo had a rocket and looking at the Nautilus submarine, it seemed like it would be metal that was a bit old and rusted. I took some time, read through a bunch of tutorials and had a go at airbrushing the metal & rust effect. I'm happy with the end result :)

I had a lot of fun building this kit. View the full build thread on The Rocketry Forum and the photos on Flickr.

The Blue Bird Zero was part of the Estes catalogue from 1980 to 1985 as kit #1335

I've always thought that this was a very neat looking kit and have wanted one for a while. Recently, Semroc have released this as a Retro Repo kit. While it's nice, I wanted something bigger. The original is about 1m tall, made from BT55 tube. Here's my 2x upscale!!  Made from BT80 body tube it stands just on 2m tall.

(Click to embiggen)

More photos on Flickr.

The Battlestar Galactica Laser Torpedo was released in 1978 by Estes. It was kit #1311

I purchased this kit, still sealed on Ebay recently. Not wanting to open the original box, I found the plans online (Both JimZ and Ye Olde Rocket Plans have copies) and bought the nose cone from Semroc. With all the parts on hand, I cloned my own copy :)

I re-drafted the decals in CorelDRAW to get a better resolution.

Click to Embiggen

Back in 1980, Estes released two kits in the "Galactic Pirates" set, only to be discontinued in 1981.
I hunted around for the plans and found that I could download them from JimZ site. The original decal design had rivets all over, but I didn't put them on this - just the main decals. It's a great looking rocket and am surprised that there aren't many around!

Click to Embiggen

November 11th, 2012 saw the final launch of the Rocketry Victoria calendar for the year. Some great flights on what turned out to be a very warm day!

I only launched a couple of small rockets - My scratch built 'Stumy' on a A3-4 and an Estes Patriot on a D-something RMS motor. There were, however, some spectacular flights including Nic's sparky 'M' rocket which was never recovered. Photos of the launch on flickr.