No, that wasn’t me that got the biggest engine he could find and glued cardboard fins and a paper nosecone to it? Who told you that I did? It’s pure libel I tell you! 
I fooled around with model rockets when I was in junior high and high school, and then took it up again more than twenty years later, when I was working at the National Air and Space Museum, where, surprisingly, there were a few model rocket buffs. (Who’d a thunk it?)
In my second phase I found a great deal of satisfaction in building models with more patience and skill than I was capable of at age 13. At age 36, I spent much more time, and was much more careful about getting a mirror smooth finishes on my fins than I ever had been as a teenager. I got back into plastic models at about the same time, also doing a much better job than I had when I was a kid.
But the important thing model rockets is that, unlike other kinds of models, you have to fly them. It doesn’t matter how much time you’ve spent building them, how perfect they look, or how much of a shame it would be to damage or lose them. You have to fly them. It’s part of the process.
I still have three of the models I built in phase two. One of them was probably the most perfect model I’ve ever built. It was gorgeous. But the only time I flew it, the ejection charge popped too early, and the shock cord tore an inch-long strip down from the top of the tube. It’s a shame, but it’s also a badge of honor. (The other two show lesser battle scars.) I could have repaired the damage, but I didn’t get around to it before leaving the hobby.
I made a big bertha once. That thing was HUGE. In the instructions for the parachute it instucts the user to simply attach the strings to the chute with a small adhesive circle. My teacher told me that I should do what most of the other rockets do which is to punch small holes in the chute, tie the strings off through the holes and then put the adhesive over the knots to make sure it was secure. I did it my way. The rocket flew…very very high…up over the school, across the street and got hung up in a tree. Becuase I attached the chute my way it slipped out of the adhesive stickers and came back to earth instead of being stuck in the tree.
God, I loved model rocketry. That was alot of fun.
ETA looking at the above link, I could have sworn I had the Big Berth, but it must have been the Mean Machine. I was in 7th or 8th grade and when it was standing up I could just barely touch the top of it.
This was my favorite one. Instead of a chute the wings came out and it glides back to earth. The problem is if you use the engine the teacher suggests (C I think, maybe a B) it only goes about three feet up due to it’s weight, then it does a lawndart type thing into the ground, then you wait for the the wings to pop out. Not very exciting. But very exciting with the correct engine. It was easily the most complex one I ever did what with all the mechanics inside to deploy the wings.
Best rocket I ever launched had one fatal flaw. Launch was perfect, straight up maybe 2000 feet and back down, on a clear day, early spring, Boulder, Colorado.
We recovered everything but the nose cone and parachute, which had detached and floated away to somewhere near Colby, Kansas…we think.
Dang, reading this stuff makes me want to get back into rocketry.
Keep an eye on The Discovery Channel (I think - somewhere in Cableland, anyway). I have seen a couple of shows about the serious rocketeers - 10,000 foot launches, Port-a-potty rockets, you name it.
Also, check these folks out. Whee!
I built one of them, too. I went way beyond the kit’s decals in making it look like a real F-14, getting decals from a hobby store and custom painting the tail with the markings and insignia of a real Tomcat squadron. It looked great, but unfortunately I don’t think I ever took any pictures of it.
It had a couple of perfect flights, but pranged in on the last one. I saved the pieces for a while, thinking I might try to repair it, but it was too far gone. I think I may have saved the tail somewhere, just as a reminder.
We built rockets in our 8th grade science class.
One kid I remember (troublemaker) decided to glue the nosecone on, forgo a chute, and drilled a small hole in the main tube for the ejection exhaust to blow out of.
The rocket went up, no chute, and came back down like a dart and stuck into the ground (luckily not near any students). The science teacher was so pissed he pulled the rocket out of the ground and tore the thing in half.
A point that has not yet been mentioned:
The higher powered engines have more fuel (duh!) and are therfore heavier. Because the engine mounts at the rear of most rockets (there are rare exceptions) the center of gravity is moved slightly rearward with a high power engine. In cases of margional stability, the rocket may be directionally stable with an A engine, and unstable with a C engine.
What happens in this case is that the rocket leaves the launch pad, goes unstable, then suddenly becomes stable in some random direction as fuel is burned off. This is much worse than if it stays unstable for the entire burn, as in that case it never keeps going far enough in any direction to get up much speed.
Long ago I remember seeing model rockets in the hobby stores with little tiny cameras; I gathered the idea was to get pics from 500 feet in the air.
Does this still exist, and has camera (or rocket) technology made any changes in how this works?
Well, the old Astrocams were based on 110 film cartridge cameras. Without the film they’re just unusually heavy rockets. According to Wikipedia Fuji discontinued production of that film style in 2004. And a quick look at Kodak’s website shows that they’re only advertising various 35mm film formats, so it seems likely that they’ve stopped making it, too.
However, Estes now offers something called the Astrovision, which is the same idea, but with a digital video camera in the nose! 
Back in the day, Estes made two camera rockets: the Camroc, which took still pictures, and the Cineroc, which was a small downward-looking camera that shot about 10 seconds of 8mm film as the rocket took off. Here’s one guy’s recollections of both, and his Camroc pictures.
These days, Estes has the Astrovision, a digital video or still camera rocket.
Also, any number of tiny lipstick or pinhole cameras with solid state recording capability could be adapted to fly. For instance, I tried out one of these for my race car: Digital wrist camera. It could probably be easily adapted to a medium sized rocket.
If you still want it, and are willing to pay for it, it’s still available.
Good luck getting it processed. I always wanted one of those rockets… 
This was the swing-wing glide return rocket I built in my physics class.
Beautiful first flight and spiral recovery.
Wing stuck on the second. Lawn dart recovery can be interesting.
You know that one that you could put an egg in? Don’t put hamsters in there instead. Just don’t.
Reading this thread, I’m shocked, shocked, to see how many people are willing to recount or allude to breaking the code of conduct for dealing with model rockets.
(And, no, I never tried to send a frog to the moon. Nope. Not me. That would be against the code.)
My teacher recommended the Tomcat to me becuase I was building them to fast. Where everone else was making one or two a week, I was knocking out at least a day. She said her son got the Tomcat and had been working on it for several weeks. Well, I sat down at the kitchen table and apperently my ADD went into hyperdrive (ADD can work work both ways ya know) and I pounded it out in 8 hours.