The Mark II flew yesterday at our Challenger 498 club launch. The full photoset is available at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Challe...08142/pic/list and I'll post a few pics here. I only flew the Mark II twice and spent the rest of the time playing with my new Fuji Finepix S2000HD digital camera, doing high speed burst mode liftoff shots!
Unfortunately I flubbed the pics of the Mark II-- I didn't prefocus on the rocket itself before liftoff, so the autofocus locked on the field in the background, so the focus is pretty soft... okay, very soft... okay, okay, it's just plain out of focus... (yall won't let me get by with claiming to be 'artsy' )
Anyway, the Mark II flew beautifully. After dodging some rain showers, I loaded her up with an A8-3 considering the wind, and put her up on her first flight! Straight up, arched east, popped the chute, and gently drifted down to the field about 50 yards from the pad... BEAUTIFUL!!! Next, I loaded her up with a B6-4, prepped, and sent her up... and up... and UP!! MAN that little bugger will flat scoot on a B6-4, even with my 'battleship' building techniques! She was just a dot in the sky when she popped the chute, and started drifting in the 10-ish mph east wind... she went about 150-200 yards from the pad, to the mid cross fence of the farm, but recovered perfectly! That Mark II is a NICE flyer!
Now, one of my club buddies read my build thread on here, and I realize I might have given a bit of a false impression. No, you don't REALLY have to be a brain surgeon to do the tank dome and blowout panels... Hey, if I can do it, anybody can ! I'm just learning like everybody else, and my hands are big and have been cut and smashed so many times doing farm stuff that I'm surprised they work as well as they do... so if anybody got 'spooked' by my attempts at humor on the tank dome and blowout panel work, don't worry... you'll do fine and it's good training for later more complicated modelling builds! Sometimes I'm too much of a smart@$$...
Anyhoo... here's the pics... Enjoy! OL JR