Back To Building Rockets

 As most of you who follow this blog have probably noticed, I've been on sort of a rocket building hiatus the past year and a half.

This has been a result of both a lack of motivation to build rockets and an over abundance of other activities that have vied for my time and monetary resources.  Model rocketry simply got put on a back-burner.

Today I resolved to turn this around, so I traipsed down the long flight of stairs to the Basement La-BOR-atory and pulled out a pair of models that were started way back in early 2023.

These are the Estes Nike Smoke and Nike Apache scale kits.

Both have been completed up to the point of having the body tube spiral seams filled and sanded, the motor mounts assembled, tubes marked, and the laser-cut balsa fins removed from the sheet.

Today's return to the builds consisted of cleaning up the fin edges and performing the shape sanding.

For both of these models I have opted out of  sanding the scale fin facet details found on the prototype sounding rockets, and have decided instead on rounding the leading and trailing edges and calling it good.

Two reasons for this:

1.  These models are being built strictly for the sport flying field.  They will never even come close to a scale competition field, and will not reside in some model museum, either.

2. I intend to fly the living heck out of both of these birds, so I see no sense in spending a huge amount of time doing meticulous scale detailing when they are going to be constantly worn down and beat up from a lot of flying time.

With that said, I hope to have these two new birds completed and ready to pierce the blue Colorado skies at the next Dove Valley launch.

I'll post more pics as the build progresses.

Cheers!