Backlog Part 1

B II On our first Gardena/Hozelock launcher
First attempt at a cable tie launcher

Part 1: This covers from around August 2009 till early September 2009.
We started, like many, with an old wine cork that had a bike pump tube pushed though a drilled out hole, filled a bottle with roughly a 1/3rd water, perched it on a brick and pumped like mad till it went in a massive cloud of vapour and we never saw the bottle again.
This was fun for a summer afternoon, although it was short lived as we were always thinking 'their must be a better way of doing this'. So we looked around a little and made a really rubbish and simple cable tie lock system and a few Basic rockets. Our understanding at the time however was crude, which was if its got fins and looks like a rocket it will work. How wrong were we the only one that had a few successful flights was the original B II as seen above. We then moved on to making a 9mm nozzle in a hurried fashion and launcher after seeing a construction video on air commands site (the nozzle did not do the instuctions justice). This nozzle never really worked so well.
Our first nozzle, it is not clear in this picture how awfully made this was.

B III (NOAA Tester) never worked. Reason: It was rubbish

We were never aware of the principle of rocket stability regarding the centre of pressure (Cp) and the centre of gravity (Cg). This was found out after we had given up the ghost with the original fleet, we also revised the NOAA system to come up with a practical solution, this will come up in the next backlog as the hobby then remained idle for us till around December 2009/early January 2010.