Estes Mini Comanche 3

This hasn’t been in the Estes catalog for a few years so these have been sitting on shelves for a while but that’s okay. It’s a great little rocket. Pick one up while you can. You’ll probably need to do a little sanding to get the centering rings to fit. Take your time and read the instructions carefully to have a successful build. There are 9 fins on this 3-stage rocket so you may want to get a fin alignment guide. I use the one from Estes and it works well for me. I’d give this 5 stars but for shipping issues. My first kit was packed by Amazon in an envelope rather than a box and one of the body tubes was dented. A replacement kit was promptly sent also in an envelope but arrived intact. I decided to keep the original and I bought some BT 20 tubes to replace the damaged tube so that I could build two kits and have some spare parts.

My son wanted to build and launch rockets for his end-of-year school science project. I have built many a soda bottle water rocket, so we started with those. Then he wanted to build some solid fuel rockets. I said he could pick three. I was happy with his choices of the Mini Fat Boy and Mini Bertha, but leery of his final pick, the Mini Comanche 3.It turned out to be a great rocket, with a really spectacular launch. However, this was a huge step up from the other two rockets. Here are the keys to our success.1. Dad built and installed the engine mounts in each stage. The engines won't "stage" correctly if they are not butted up against each other. The three engine mounts must be installed correctly to accommodate the stacked engines without any extra room. The instructions have tips like "remove quickly" when installing the engine mounts in the upper stage. It took me a few minutes to figure out what that meant. It was a key instruction. Probably too complicated for the average 10 year old.2. We installed all the engine mounts before my son put the fins on. Also, we labelled each stage so that the correct fins went on each stage.3. One coat of primer, one coat of gloss white, and one finish coat. We tried to keep the weight of the rocket down, and this paint scheme left us with a great looking and relatively light rocket.4. Large launch site. We used the local high school practice fields. The rocket left the launch pad slightly off of vertical and appeared to be slowing down. When the second stage kicked in, the rocket was not pointing straight up (no where near horizontal, but probably 4 or 5 degrees from vertical). So, the 2nd and 3rd stages took the rocket slightly away from the launch site. The rocket landed approximately 75 yards away from the launch pad (perpendicular to the wind direction). This would not have worked in a smaller field.My son and the rest of the family loved this rocket. It rose slowly, and then really took off with the second stage. The orange streamers were easily visible on the way down.Lots of fun, but I recommend adult building off the key parts: the motor mounts. And, don't launch on a windy day in a small field :-)

Like all Estes rockets my son and I have ever built, of which there have been many, this one goes together and flies well. The instructions are clear, but you need to pay attention, as each of the three stages includes similar, but different, sub-assemblies. The decals, however, leave something to be desired. They are very thin and very easily rip apart, as more than half ours did, even though I have been putting decals on models for almost fifty years.

I have been buying and building a lot of estes rockets recently, and this one has been the worse in terms of quality. It could just have been a lemon, but there were a lot of things that were wrong with it.* The instructions were horrible. For instance, there was no indication what stage the steps corresponded to, which is a problem because they are each slightly different. Not a show stopper, since most people could probably think about it for a bit then build it without the instructions.* The engine lugs (rings that center the engine tube in the body tube) were not even remotely centering, leading to all the engines pointing at (different) angles. That made it extremely hard to actually put the stages on, because the engines don't line up.* The engine coupling tubes were too big. I had to sand them down to make the stages fit together. Sanding them down just barely works because it makes the cardboard surface fuzzy, which may allow them to fit together, but then get stuck and don't come apart.* Full up, it's heavy and barely lifts off on the A10 engines. I'm not the best builder in the world, but I didn't soak it in glue or paint it.I launched the rocket 3 times before I threw it away:1) Single stage. A10-3T. Worked fine.2) Two stage. A10-0T/A10-3T. Engine's didn't line up well. The stages didn't separate- the upper stage just blew the first stage motor out of the back then charred the first stage engine tube.3) Three stage. A10-0T/A10-0T/A10-3T. Difficult to assemble because of the alignment issues. Very slow launch. First stage separation occurred ~10ft above the launch pad. The slow launch meant the rocket rotated to almost horizontal before it staged. Second & third stage then flew horizontal for several hundred yards. Once again, the second stage failed to separate - it just blew the motor out the back.After #3, I decided the rocket was way to dangerous to launch around my kids, so I chucked it.

This is a cool rocket. These rockets need to be put together like a model. A lot of people who have no experience with these dont understand that you cant just buy the rocket and go out and launch it. You will need glue and paint to build it. You will need engines and ignites and a launch pad etc. It sounds like a lot but you can get everything for well under $100. If it's your first rocket, I'd recommend something like the Tandem X set. That has basically everything you'll need except for the engines and recovery wadding.

The estes mini comerch 3 was a total let down, it not only needed a tonne of extra supplies which cost more then the rocket, the instructions let out the most important part, to make the stages fit together. Then there are the materials, the only thing that was not a paper towel roll or a piece of cardboard was the the nose cone and all it was a peace of plastic, and as soon as you try to build it the cardboard bends and breaks.So it is way easier and three times cheaper to just build one your self.