New Water Rocket Parachute Deploy Tutorial Video

After several of years building rockets and finding ways to increase our personal best altitudes, we realized that there was a lot of unexplored territory in different areas of water rocketry which we found appealing. In many cases, traditional designs and methods of construction had remained unchanged for over 10 years, and many of them seemed overly complex and perhaps could be a barrier to attracting new people into this fun hobby.

We decided to take a clean slate approach to building water rockets to try and find new ways of doing things, or ways to make traditional techniques easier and more attractive to potential new people. By choosing this goal, we hope to inspire others of you to revisit old methods and look for improvements or creative new ways to do things.

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We first focused our attention of making a simple and inexpensive method of activating a servo to control a parachute system, and from that effort emerged the ServoChron™ low cost servo deploy timer.

From the feedback we received from people who were interested in ServoChron™, there were many people who wanted to add a parachute system to their Water Rockets, but were intimidated by the intricate and complex looking traditional deploy systems which they were able to find. This feedback led us to focus our attention on creating a parachute system that is extremely easy to make and takes only a few minutes of valuable time.

The following video presents our simple U.S. Water Rockets Axial Deploy Parachute Recovery System, and demonstrates how incredibly simple it is to make.


The video also includes a demonstration test flight showing how the system operates, which employs a new type of external camera rig for a unique view of the system in action.

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To accompany the video tutorial, we have also produced a very detailed step-by-step illustrated web based tutorial for this project, and loaded it with tons of photos and extra construction tips. The web based tutorial and the free template files are available on our website. Click the link below to see the web version:
U.S. Water Rockets Axial Deploy System Construction Tutorial

The new system can be triggered using any popular water rocket timing mechanism, such as a Tomy Timer, or and air-speed flap. We use the ServoChron™ for our flights, since it is very rugged and inexpensive. If you would like to use the ServoChron™ for your system, the related pages describing the ServoChron™ can be found at the link:
ServoChron Servo Parachute Recovery Timer Quick Start Guide and Construction Page

In conclusion, we would like to remind you that we have several other updated construction tutorials on our website, and several more of them nearly completed. Look for these tutorials at:
USWaterRockets.com

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