My brother, friends and I build, broke, burned and rebuilt so many of their rockets, I think NORAD had a dish dedicated just to tracking our flights.
We were big on all the Cox cars and planes, too. Most of my allowance and lawn-mowing money went up in smoke on those.
My freinds and i built many a model rocket, my second being “Big Bertha”, my first rocket i got on my b-day the day Elvis died....can’t remember the name of that one.....My mother was crying her eyes out the whole day.
Ayways, over time we realized that the rocket body itself was a money waste....We started to glue the fins right onto the engines.
kinda took the fun out of recovery but half the time there was no recovery.
we called them pocket rockets.
Yeah, me too. Then we found out about launch rods....Still crashed a lot of them, though. Had a Big Bertha that crashed so many times she was about 6 inches long when the fins finally burned off.