Those are great photos George.

This is before super glue and I call it, "will that stupid glue ever dry" CA 1976 Working on a Klingon Battlecruiser I won at my first Boeing Employees Rocketry club meeting in Kent Washington.

Wow! Coverage, even! :cool:

I tried a rocket sled in the winter of 1977 or 78. Didn't work at all, but the disassembly was impressive.

Great thread idea.

I have to scan some old pics to post.

Here's a few I have scanned.

1 - Mini Max Scorpion, SSRS E30, iirc, circa 1977-78

2,3 - the Air and Space Museum model rocket display, April 1982

My early years of the hobby were filmed with a Kodak X-15 Instamatic camera using 126 film.
I used slide film as it didn't require an additional printing cost.

My slides are currently all packed away but I did scan three of the slides in the past.

Here then are those slides from 1972-1973:

1) Launch of my Estes Citation Patriot on a B4-2 motor

2) Launch of my Estes Firing Line RTF X-15 on an A3-2T motor

3) A group photo of all my rockets at the time, circa 1972

My rocket car, the red one in the middle, I converted into a rocket sled after a rare snow in 1978. Put skids on it in place of the whells. At first, used old FSI D4 engines. Kaboom. Kboom. Kaboom. Four in a row catoed! They had been fine the previous summer. OH, cold temperatures, the first real-world data I had, personally, for engines blowing up more in cold weather. I switched to Estes C6. Those worked. But the car's rear skids did just that.....skidded. The car's back end skidded out to the side, it would not run straight. So if I did it again I'd do something more like skis parallel to the snow (the skids were 1/32" plywood at angles of about 30 degrees to the snow)

But it was literally a spur-of-the-moment idea due to the rare snow, did what I could in about an hour and then tried it.

A few more photos.

BT-50 sized Concorde model, using a similar internal pod method as the SkyDart. Plans were in the July 1980 issue of the Model Rocketeer. The Wasatch Rocketry "SST" HPR glider was an uncredited ripoff of this design.


After Sunguidance in 1988, a project in 1989 using the same system to control a gimbaled motor. The system technically worked but due to sunguidance never pointing the engine straight for liftoff, that caused complications (and at least a couple of flights got into a roll so fast that the modle ended up flying ballistically. And one finless attempt went totally out of control as the sunguidance deflected the mount too much for launch to be able to maintain control) . Most of the flights were F10 powered, but the very first was 2-staged D12 with the booster fized straight, the upper stage being gimbaled.

At NARAM-34 in 1992, a dry lakebed site near Las Vegas. F powered helicopter model. Blades was 3" by 36". Model flew well, IIRC over 4 minutes. winning Team div.


Two Little Joe-II photos, decades apart. At left, by Ric Gaff, at Johnson Space Center in 1979 at NARAM-21. Mark Bundick pointing at the "do not climb on display " sign, as the rest of us have climbed onto the display. I'm at the far right end. In 1979, I never had any ideas of building serious scale models someday. I liked the Little Joe-II, but never thought of scratchbuilding one. The other photo, 2014 at the International Space Hall of Fame Museum in Alamogordo, NM. With the only other surviving (mostly) Little Joe-II.


OK, so by 1990 I had gotten good at scale and built competitive Little Joe-II models. NARAM-34 in 1992 had Super Scale, so I built a pad to go along with it. Jay Marsh at left, Wayne Hendricks at right.

Cool pics, George.
Nice to see a pic of someone WITH a cigarette in these days of "everything BADDD tor you" can't show, PC crapola.

Hope to figure out on Friday which of our numerous old photo albums have some of my old rocketry photos from the late 60s. Hopefully will post some tomorrow.

Jay FINALLY kicked the habit, does not smoke anymore (that was a 1992 pic).

My mother DIED of lung cancer, after decades of smoking. It was a terrible way to go. An inevitable downhill struggle over a period of about 7 months after she was diagnosed, an insane never-explained delay of nearly 2 months to begin radiation therapy (which failed).

And a final 3 months or so of home hospice care where I was the primary care giver, with a hospice nurse dropping by for an hour or so 2-3 times a week. Even with supplemental oxygen, she got to the point where her lungs could not function well enough so her oxygen level dropped to the point where she was incoherent, did not know who she was and did not know who I was. Not Alzheimer's, literally low oxygen affecting her brain.

Kill yourself however you want to kill yourself, if that's your thing. But it's a terrible way to go. And if you have friends/family, it's gonna be hard on them. Her last few months, especially last few weeks, was the darkest time of my life.