Descon Mini-Jen

Scratch - Mini-Jen {Scratch}

Contributed by Chris Taylor Jr.

Manufacturer: Scratch
Mini Jen
(Contributed - by Chris Taylor)

I wanted a Rocket Glider 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 Delta Wing 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 bar 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 NOSE heavy 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]

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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