The Shadow Knows.....

I love hot rods. I love the idea of taking a good design and reworking it until the envelope is truly pushed. Cars, rockets, whatever...they can all be made just a little faster; a little crazier. Witness the Thrustline Aerospace Black Shadow.

I won the Black Shadow kit many years ago in a rocket contest. It was a good, honest kit, about 17 inches tall and with a 18mm engine mount.

The original design

It just didn't speak to me, though. For some reason it struck me as a little stubby looking and under powered. It needed a little....souping up.....

First, I decided that 18mm was just too small. That engine mount went into the junk bin and a 24mm mount replaced it. Now I needed to make the rocket look like it could scream. I went from four fins to three, added leading vanes on the fins, and installed a tail cone. Finally, I printed up some custom decals. And....

The Black Shadow SS. (Super Sport). Now I had a rocket that easily zooms out of sight, and looks great doing it! I've flown it several times and so far I've been lucky and gotten it back every time.

And that is how I took a good model and turned it into something I consider great!

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high!

This is Not a Post

Due to the Texas Education Agency's somewhat strange preoccupation with giving high stakes standardized tests to elementary students, Mr. Powley is being held in a "testing dungeon" until next week. There is nothing to see here. Move along.

Tales of The Rocketman!

Way back in September, I had a birthday. Ok, that's not particularly interesting, but I'm building to something here. You see whenever someone has a birthday at my work, a wonderful lady named Ms. Powell makes a big sign to go outside of their room or office (hey, it is an elementary school, after all). Here is mine:

You can see that the signs refer to interests of the "birthday person." In my case we have Disney, music and rockets. Fair enough. However, it was the rocket part that caught my eye. At first glance, I thought that "Rocketman" was a reference to "The Rocketeer" by Disney, but when I looked closer, I saw that it wasn't....at least not directly.

My interest piqued, I looked up this trashcan helmeted hero and found this:

http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/122/

It seems THIS Rocketman came a few decades before the Disney version, although it actually inspired the later movie. Actually, it inspired a comic book that then inspired the movie, but its close enough. By the way, the three nobs  on his suit are for up, down, speed. Apparently NASA sure went out of their way to make spaceflight more complicated!

By the way, if you haven't seen "The Rocketeer," you should probably check it out. It's a great campy period piece that never got the audience it deserved.

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high!

My Favorite April Fools Picture

Well April Fools comes around but once a year, but it is always a festive occasion in Blogworld. One of the best of the best at the April Fools blog is Major Pepperidge over at Gorillas Don't Blog. This year he ran a "best of" series, and while I certainly encourage you to check it out, I borrowed my favorite for my little ol' blog. Actually, this is the second time I've borrowed it, since I ran it in the newsletter a few years ago when it first came out. So, without further blithering from me here is my favorite April Fools picture with commentary by none other than Major Pepperidge himself!

The good Major states, "It's still my favorite! The original slide was vertical, but I wanted more room for the rocket to fly in, so I cropped off some of the bottom and  painted in some additional sky. Then I found a decent photo of the Moonliner (I needed to see pretty much the whole thing), and altered it to look as if it was up above us, with the legs in the "closed" position. Next I found a nice exhaust plume from an Ares rocket launch, and spent quite a bit of time trying to make it look like it was behind some elements, and in front of others, so that it felt like it was inside the park. Then I added a bit of extra glow around the base of the rocket to make the blast feel hot and bright. There are some things I might do differently these days, but I'm leaving it be."

So there you have it! Have a fantastic week and fly 'em fast and high!

A TWA Observation...

I have several fairly rare items in my Disney collection. One of these is a tray that was produced in 1954, before Disneyland was actually built. It looks something like this:

The map looks pretty close to the finished product, but there are some glaring differences. For example, the bandstand was moved from Town Square early in construction due to the fact that it blocked the view of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Another difference is how the TWA Moonliner looks. Instead of the almost complete curve of the actual rocket, it has a much more thin and pointed look to it:

When I recently looked at the tray again, a flicker of recognition went off in my brain. It actually looks pretty close to this:

So, it seems that my modification of the Red River Rocketry Red Star's paint scheme might not have been quite as original as I thought. Oh well, I still lile the way it turned out, and it's a great tribute to the first TWA Moonliner designs!

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high!

Rain...Rain.....More Rain....

Well, the rain has successfully interrupted Megalaunch and this week's regular launch. So, what else can it wreck? How about finishing projects? Case in point, my Estes Photon Disruptor. I finally got around to building it as a kind of companion piece to my Estes Odyssey. I wanted to get it all done so that I could fly both of them at the launch....today....that was cancelled. But it doesn't really matter because this is what the Photon Disruptor looks like right now:

Yep, it is WAY too humid to paint anyway. Now don't get me wrong, I love the fact that we are getting much needed rain, but can't we do like one week off and one week on or something? Sheesh! Hopefully we'll get caught up on rain soon and we can get back to normal. A rocketeer lives a tough life sometimes!

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high! (and dry!)

Jupiter Descending...

Weather has a lot of consequences in a place like Texas. It can be unpredictable and fairly violent at times. It can postpone rocket contests (like it did with Megalaunch this weekend) or it can have even more profound effects....historic, even.

Let me back up a little. For years I have been participating in Moon Day with John Dyer, Suzy Sprague, Jack Sprague, and many others from DARS. Moon Day takes place at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field, which boasts many historic air and space craft (the star being Apollo 7). One of the lesser players was a Jupiter missile that was kept in a side parking lot. I say was, because it is no more.

My wife is into recycling. She would, if she could, single-handedly save the planet. Part of her program is to take cans and other metal bits to the local scrap yard in Garland. Since I was off this week for Spring Break, I tagged along. When we pulled in the gate, we saw this:

After the shock of running into a ballistic missile in our local scrap yard wore off, I told Laurie that it sure looked like the old Jupiter missile from the Frontiers of Flight Museum. We asked the lady at the front desk about it and she said that it was the same. She said the recent wind storms pushed it into a fence and almost onto a road and had damaged it. She said the museum decided that it was a liability so "someone that knew someone" called them to scrap it! However, she also said, "Don't worry, it will never be cut up. We just can't do it. It's history! Its worth more to us like it is!"
She then went on to show us that she had a pretty darn good grasp of U.S. history herself, talking about the Cuban missile crises and related events.

So, if you want to see this old war bird, just go to DFW Industrial Metals & Recycling at 1340 Commerce in Garland, Texas. They encouraged me to tell everyone in DARS about the missile, and to mention that if you have any metal to recycle, they can certainly help you! It's good to know they appreciate history, too!

Until next time, fly 'em fast and high!