Mini Jen
(Contributed -
by Chris Taylor) I wanted a that did NOT need to get rid of a
power pod. I wanted it SMALL light and launched with mini engines and making a
rather nice hand launched glider as well.
For the body I used a Mosquito minus fins (perfect fit :-) and Balsa for
everything else. Narrow deep swept back wings, two vertical tails, and two
(biplane) straight wings spanning the top and bottom of the two vertical
stabilizers. This way it will be symmetrically stable and yet there is a place
for the engine exhaust to go to :-)
Kind of like a Box Kite it is a Quasi Biplane Canard Wing plane
all in one. Glides are WONDERFUL very light a floater and not to slow either,
moves pretty good, HARD to make it do more than gentle turns though (this is
because there is almost NO dihedral)
I will be flying this rocket Sunday July 12 with my club PARA, and I will
report on it success or failure.
About the name
When I got done this rocket it looked vaguely familiar, so I went hunting and
eventually found a VERY similar design using standard engines and a bit bigger
:-) It was an ESTES plan from 1962 and it was called the Flying Jenny. So in
honor of this similarity I called mine the mini Jen and I actually modified my
design to incorporate something different. My design has a stabilizer from
bottom of engine mount to leading edge of wing to control vibration and wing
shear
I have high hopes for it success. How it works is neat to. I trim it to
Glide THAT'S IT. Since the engine is up FRONT it makes it seriously
which is how a rocket needs to be, so it should go good as a rocket and when
ejection charge fires, it pops the engine out of the plane and now it is
balanced for GLIDE.
Pretty neat. . . I thought at least.
![[Rocket Pic]](../../images_descon/minijen.gif)
Update
I found out where I got this design so similar to old Estes plans even though I
never saw the Estes plans before. SDI makes a similar design called the
X-Static which is nearly identical in basic geometry. I likely saw this before
while browsing there site.
Flight Report
I flew this plane ONCE and lost it to the corn. PARA, my club, flies at a corn
field and it landed in 7 foot high cornstalks 20 minutes of searching left me
empty handed even though it landed less than 50 feet away :-( so I will make
another :-)
The Flight was very nice actually. It went vertical to about a guess of 100
feet and performed a power loop (likely because a lot of propellant was used up
bringing its CG closer to Glide point).
The engine popped and it glided nicely with a little too tight a turn but
acceptable (again due to lack of Stabilizing Dihedral)
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