As promised, I did manage to immerse myself into some rocketry projects yesterday.
The first order of business was to facilitate repairs on a couple of birds that got busted up last fall.
The first was the Rascal rocket glider. On its maiden flight, a hard landing broke the fuselage in three places. These are now glued back together and awaiting the application of a strengthening/reinforcement scheme.
In parallel, a new fin for the EAC Viper was fashioned, attached, sealed, and brush painted. I still have to do the masking and painting of the orange and purple areas, but the bird will soon be in shape to fly at the next launch session.
Intertwined with these projects, I also managed to glue on the fins of the Estes Omega sustainer stage. Note the cool LEGO-built cradle.
At the same time, I finished papering the booster fins, which will probably get attached today.
Oh, and the frosty trek to the mailbox paid off. The Estes catalog had indeed arrived!
I haven't sat down and perused it in detail yet, but I'll get to it later today, as well.
Cheers!
Last night I cut my first set of fins since April. The idea was to finish up a couple of stalled projects, then fly on Sunday, but we awoke to a major downpour this morning. B6-4 Field will likely be submerged for the next few weeks. That said, I'm grateful that a downpour like this came on the heels of a 70 degree day. This kind of precipitation generally means a foot or more of snow in a normal February.
ReplyDeleteHi, Bill,
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you are getting back on track. I've been somewhat of a slacker as of late with rocketry projects. Instead, I've been focusing a lot on music recording, organizing stuff, and LEGO projects (check out my parallel LEGO blog- link is above ).
Also, the snow and freezing temps have been relentless in Colorado so far this entire year, so there haven't even been any thoughts of rocket flying. Hoping that will change soon.
What kind of ideas do you have about strengthening the fuselage for the Rascal glider? My Semroc Hawk did the same thing on the first flight, only it was in the air and quite obviously due to a wildly enthusiastic ejection charge. I don't have much hope for it, but I'm planning on giving it one more try.
ReplyDeleteHi, Bill,
ReplyDeleteI'm still mulling that one over.
Some of the options include card stock reinforcement, a thin layer of epoxy over the fuselage, a balsa T-bar strip, or epoxying a length of .020 music wire along the bottom of the fuselage.
The problem with the original build was that I used a very light grade of balsa for the fuselage. It just couldn't handle all the flight and landing stresses. Needs help...