Australian Rocketry

Hello team.

Relatively new to rocketry here but a few weeks ago I purchase and built an Estes rocket kit. Went to my local club as a guest to launch and for some reason the delay charge in the motor did not deploy. Members at the club had a close look at the motor and concluded that the delay charge did not go off but could not figure out why. Any suggestions as to why it may not have gone off?
One of the members said that Estes motors are on the "cheaper" end of quality maby it could have been a quality control issue.

Any suggestions much appreciated. Many thanks.

Estes are the industry standard black powder motors. Nothing about them is on the cheaper end of the scale. Realistically, no one else manufactures on the same scale. Quality control issues do occur, but they aren’t common, and much less common than AP motors.

The two questions I guess I would ask are;

1) how was it determined the delay charge didn’t go off which is really uncommon, as opposed to a too tight chute, too much wadding or too tight nose cone. All of which are fairly common events leading to a failure to deploy the recovery.

2) are you 100% sure it wasn’t a -0 motor with no deployment charge? I did it several times in my early days before I 100% got my head around the motor nomenclature.

My 2c


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk