Depends, How Much Money You Got?

Kimmyk left a comment on my previous post asking if the rocket hobby is expensive. It's a question that I've gotten from coworkers, friends, family, accidental spectators. It seems to be the first question that occurs to people.

It's asked, generally, as if it's a straight yes-or-no deal. But it's a hobby, like any other. It will take all the money you ever want to throw at it, plus that much more to grow on. But you don't have to feed it that much to have some fun. It can be as simple or complicated, expensive or cheap as you make it.

The short answer: when I stumbled into the hobby with my kiddos, I was recently separated, trying to adjust from a two income household to one income minus child support, and at a time of year when overtime was scarce. So basically, if it had been expensive, it would not have been.

The kit that started us out on this jag was $25 at Wal-Mart. That was a practically read-to-fly model with an altimeter in the nose cone (Gonzo and Gonzo II are a similar model without that gadget, $16), which comes with an ignition system, launch rod, a couple of engines, etc. It's not as 'ready' to fly as I originally thought when I put that package in my cart, but it's a pretty thorough setup.

There are kits as cheap as $4. There are also kits as expensive as $120 (for a cool digital video setup).




Why would I spend $120 for a camera that would really be good for what, one blog post? And I can cheat and crosslink Estes' own video for it?

Plus, I know from experience not to launch anything I have to get back. It's good to recover rockets, they can be launched again and again, but I'm not losing sleep over a $4 model. A $120 model that disappeared with the damned video, I'm not in a financial position to have a sense of humor about that.

Estes' Skywriter kit is our favorite so far, and it's an $8 kit. It's the one made to look like a pencil. It's also light, so it flies spectacularly high. We've lost Scribble I and Scribble II, but so far we've managed to keep track of Scribble III. I tweaked the factory package in that I omitted the upper half of the body on the second one, and added it to the third, so Scribble III is half again as tall as Estes' design. Flies straight, but could stand to go on a longer, stiffer launch rod.

Speaking of launch rods, the larger models require a 3/16" launch rod (referred to as 5mm because Communists infiltrated the hobby with their Metric System bullshit back in the 60s). Hobby shops sell this item as a two piece thing you have to assemble, $15. But you can get a four foot length of 3/16" steel rod at Home Depot, no assembly required, $1.39.



See also paint: hobby shops sell mini-cans of Testor for $4, but the hardware store sells monster cans of Krylon that works better for $3. There's even cheaper spray paint, of course, big cans for $1 at Dollar General, but with a very limited color selection.

As far as other expenses, motors are cheap. A pack of three C-type, the most powerful stuff I've launched, is less than $5. When you get into higher powered stuff, and I am tempted, you spend more money. A three-pack of E engines will run you over $15. That's four times the impulse of a C engine, and an E-9 would also burn half again as long as a C-6, so you're getting something for the extra money: a good chance that not only will you lose the model, there's so much thrust, you might not even see it leave the launch pad. A puff of smoke and a hearty 'where'd he go??'



A G-type engine will run you over $20 for a single engine. High powered rockets beyond G, well, if you need to know how much it costs, you're probably not a high-powered rocket person. I know I'm not.

I'm having fun with it, and so are my kiddos. Plus, I'm learning some math/physics that I was too cool to learn as an adolescent. You don't have to learn such things, but I bought a 'designer' set of tubes, noses, etc. because I wanted to learn more about it, design my own, etc.



The 'Designer's Special' cost about as much as I'd have spent on three or four kits, but it comes with enough stuff to make upwards of eight models. And leaves you some leftover parts to modify future kits. So it doesn't end up being all that expensive, but I'm having to learn about center of gravity and center of pressure, some of the basic engineering principles that go into making sure it's stable in flight. Yes, these are basically toys, but toys that go upwards of 150mph to 300mph, so when you stray from kits, you want to pay a attention to fundamentals.

Of course it's more trouble sculpting your own wings from sheet balsa, having to sand and paint and so on. Some kits require all of ten minutes assembly, where making it from scratch might take a couple hours spread out over a weekend. It's kind of ideal for me that way, because I can build when I get a free moment. My lawn is overgrown because I can't remember the last time I was home during daylight when I didn't have Mo to watch and it wasn't raining. Some of these kits I've built at the kitchen counter while making grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken nuggets for my daughters, listening to Em recite Pirates of the Caribbean and so on.



Speaking of building in the kitchen: when I do, Mo gets very, very excited. She giggles and runs up and down the length of the house. Sometimes making sounds to imitate the rocket's hiss and pop. She did, one time, snatch a piece from one of these kits when I wasn't looking. It was a little yellow tube for setting the engine block in place. When I noticed it missing, I asked her if she took a tube from the counter. 'Yellow' she said. When I said I needed it back to finish building the rocket, she got whiney. She had clearly disappeared it, we couldn't find it anywhere (even when I offered Em a $1 bounty if she found it). I found a workaround, no big deal. It wasn't even an expensive model (a two-pack for $8 if memory serves, Wal-Mart doesn't carry many but their prices are great on what they do stock).

I've made Mo sit 'criss-cross-applesauce' as a way of keeping her a safe distance from the launcher, and after the rocket takes off, she's so excited, she has to crab-walk: she knows I told her to sit there, but she hopes scooting side to side on hands and heels will be close enough to sitting still. It's very cute.