Steve Griffin's Balloon Building
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Steve Griffin's Balloon Building
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This is the 2nd balloon that I built, it was also built to attempt some records. It is a 400m3 / 14,000 ft3 , 16 gore envelope and it is made out of a combination of Soarcoat (Pink) and Gelvenor LCN286 (Orange). The Soarcoat was left-over from a project that was started back in 1995. This system is also very light with the envelope coming in at 14.5kg / 32 lb. I made up a double liquid-fire burner for this one which is interchangeable in the load frame for the Itty Bitty-1 the double burner and frame total just under 4.5 kg / 9 lb. This one is very responsive and a hoot to fly. In Feb 2003 I set a fairly respectable Australian duration record of 2 hours 18 minutes in this balloon on a relatively warm (-10oC) day. On the day that I made an altitude run I chickened out when the GPS had me travelling at 100 km/hr at about 4000 feet, an Australian altitude record was recorded at 1815 meters. In Feb 2004 this balloon was used to break the Australian AX-2 - AX-5 altitude records with a flight to 3235 metres (10,615 feet). The AX-2 & AX-3 distance record was also raised to 47.237km.
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