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I cannot attend Balls but I will be watching this closely.
watermelonman said:Yo, I you have had some pretty extreme MD flights, sans tip to tip. Is that correct? What kinds of sizes and velocity are we talking about? I think I am going to do a wildman punisher Md style, with 75mm4G motors in mind. Definitely L1115/M1101, maybe M1830 or even L2375.
thanks to some staffer at a metalyard after spending my expendable income for the entire year on this project.
I forced myself to take Tuesday night off to go to the gym for the first time in two weeks and attend to the rest of my life.
Plan was to hit the ground running Wednesday night on the sanding. I got home at 5:45 and didn't want to do precision work tired from the work day, so I closed my eyes for "half an hour" and the next thing I knew it was 6am. My body has had it with this project, I guess.
So, last night was the night. 4 hours of sanding 7-11, one hour per fillet, and we have 4 out of 8 done. I reached a convenient stopping point when my fingers started to bleed (even though I was wearing gloves to extend the time it took for my fingers to get worn through the skin), acetone got in the cuts and I decided my state was no longer conducive to precision work.
A note about these fillets; over the years, I've gotten pretty good at shaping fillets with epoxies designed to be shaped (ProSet and the like). All it takes is a little smoothing with 180 grit and the fins melt into the body tube. ProSet, 4500, RocketPoxy etc are plenty strong enough for most anything (Verrukt even used RocketPoxy), but we were going for raw strength here. After the disaster with the first set of fillets using unthickened epoxy, I switched to something that looked like a hairball mixed with tar and was impossible to shape. I did the best I could by putting peel ply over it and pressing a 54mm tube down over the peel ply, but peel ply can wrinkle slightly when wetted out, etc. and so on. Point being, even after sanding until my fingers bled, these are probably the worst looking fillets I've had in years, but they're also the strongest. The divots will serve as nice surface prep for the layup and we should be all set.
Notice the circular machine marks on the righthand fillet pictured; this was the guinea pig fillet with all the various tools I bought that ultimately failed to be effective. Again, it'll serve as good surface prep.
The scabs on my fingers will need a few days to heal; good thing I've arranged with my friend to use his garage tonight and tomorrow night to get the two mixes on the motor done, so by Sunday, I should be good to go.
This is going to come down to the 11th hour, as per usual.
-prophecy
Looking good, Steve! We should talk GSE needs as well as plans for getting stuff out to Black Rock - I'd love to help however I can...
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