Care and Feeding of Parachutes
 

Are you having troubles getting your parachutes to open? Here are some ideas you might want to try.

First of all, we will talk about the Estes/Quest type plastic parachutes.

An otherwise unoccupied weekend can be put to good use backfitting all of your present chutes. These modifications will allow quicker turn around and ease replacement problems.

For each of your rockets:

• Remove your parachute from the rocket.
• Take a toothpick or other small straight instrument and poke it through all of the holes so all of the tie points are together on the stick.
• Trim the ends off the shroud lines, so you have six even lengths of string rather than three loops.
• Pass all six shroud lines through a fishing swivel and tie them into a knot.
• put a drop of epoxy or CA onto the knot.

There you go! Repeat for the other 28 rockets in your inventory ;-).

For the rocket, if the parachute was attached to the nose cone, use a large enough fishing swivel to make it around the tie-off point on the nose cone. If the parachute was attached to the shock cord, tie a small knot in the shock cord so you have a loop where the parachute was originally tied to. DO NOT apply CA or epoxy to this knot! Adhesives weaken the shock cord and will cause it to break!

This completes the rocket portion of the article. Now let's talk about storage of the parachutes.

If you leave your parachutes wadded up in the tubes for a month or more, what makes you think the chute will open when it's supposed to? When it comes to storage, flat is where it's at.

All you need for flat storage is some quart sized Ziplock-type bags. You will also need some baby powder. Repeat this for each parachute. Hold the parachute in your hand, and sprinkle the underside of the 'chute with baby powder and gently rub it around. Carefully flatten out the parachute, folding in in half as if you were going to prep it or launch. Fold the parachute in half again, so you have a pizza slice. Carefully fold the shroud lines and the swivel back and lay it on top of the parachute, then insert into the bag and seal.

Using a catalog (or writing the info down before you take the 'chute off) record what size parachute each rocket uses. You want to make sure you don't accidentally put a 12" parachute on a rocket needing an 18" (or even multiple!) parachutes. This will prevent a too fast descent and possible rocket landing damage. Putting an 18" chute on a rocket meant for 12" will probably mean a landing in Dyersburg.

Prepping the rocket

Insert the proper amount of wadding into the body tube. After attaching the proper parachute to the rocket about to fly, flatten the parachute so it looks like the picture Figure 1. Fold it twice more until you have a slice of pizza. Fold the tip of the 'chute over until it touches the base of the parachute. Fold it in half again, then loosely roll the chute up into the shroud lines until you get within 1" of the swivel. NOTE: Do not wrap the shroud lines around the parachute, as the lines will get tangled. Last step: take one sheet of wadding and cup the parachute and shroud lines into it before inserting the parachute into the rocket.

Your rocket is ready to fly and will have a complete deployment of its recovery system.

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