Spad pad photos

Does anyone have photos of the type of pad?

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showthread.php?125839-Bill-Spadafora&p=1461606#post1461606 includes a good photo.



Bill made hundreds of them. He made all the CMASS pad heads, the NARAM pad heads, the MMMSC pad heads and many, many more.

The originals are made from scrap Corian(R) counter parts and other spare parts a Master plumber has on hand. Others have made they from aluminum and wood.

They have flat Corian(R) rod holder plate with a 17/64" hole on the top to hold 1/8", 3/16" and 1/4" rods. The rod is held in place with a threaded handle that fastens through the side. The lower side of the plate has a clearance hole for a second threaded handle with allow the rod angle to be adjusted.

The intermediate Corian(R) plate can be threaded to accommodate the thread rod handle and is separated from the rod holder by a thin washer disk.

The intermediate plate has (2) threaded holes at the bottom to permit attachment to a circular Corian(R) disk.

The lower circular plate has two coundersunk hole for the attachment screws holding the intermediate plate and a central hole to permit passage of a screw for for attaching spring loaded post holder clamp. The spring loading of the screw allows for 360 degree rotation of the pad head without tools.

The lowest square headed screw clamp is welded on to permit attachment to a wire fence post that is pounded into the ground as a pad post. A standard faucet handle with a remove before flight flag is used to tighten the square head screw. (The flag makes loosing the handle difficult by not impossible.)

Bob Krech

Made some, sold some scruple years back. Still ave the parts & supplies make more, if anyone's interested.


Mike

A couple.... Rotten spell checker...

MikeyR.Saginaw said:

Made some, sold some scruple years back. Still ave the parts & supplies make more, if anyone's interested.


Mike

Click to expand...

Mike,

Do you have a picture of what you’ve built-I might be interested. Had a nice head made up a few years back, but got lost when we had to move stuff out of the basement.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Jon

I am interested in one to take measurements from. I want to add this to the club pads.

You can get the plans from NARTS, costs $4


Mike

I posted some pictures in this forum a while back. Search for corian. It should pop Ishtar up.


Mike

thanks

And here's the perfect rocket to fly off of it.

I got mine at a NARAM auction years ago. Solid as a rock. Perfectly adjustable. If you can find / build one, get one.

Our club has some attempted "improvements" to the spad pad that, honestly, I don't think they improve at all. 1st, we had to use thicker corian as the thickness Bill used is either no longer available or not from our sources. 2nd we use a heavy solid round bar instead of a green fence post (ostensibly to support 3.3lb rockets), so the base is a simple pipe flange, bolted to the base piece, with a threaded handle to tighten it to the post. To turn the pad you have to loosen the threaded handle on the pipe flange. Not as sophisticated as the spring-loaded free rotation of Bill's, but it doesn't require welding. From the base piece up, however, it is pretty similar. Not sure if we have a washer between the intermediate plate and the rod holder plate. Our threaded handles are not near as nice as Bill's pad, however. And since I can't convince our club to use the CMASS semi-circle pad setup, we now have racks that have four round bars on which to mount our pad heads.

I modified Bill's original base by using another circular piece of corian. I found a pvc pipe collar that matched a hole cutter I had, then cut a hole about .25 inches deep in the corian disk. The collar fit into this and is held on by a bolt, spring, fender washer and nut. The collar attaches to a post with hose clamps. Hey, it works....

The only materials problem is that they don't make corian as thick as they used to....


Mike

MikeyR.Saginaw said:

The only materials problem is that they don't make corian as thick as they used to....

Mike

Click to expand...

Interesting. We could only find corian that was much thicker (1" vs the 3/4" of Bill's) though we noticed that some of the stock was laminated (i.e. two layers that split if there was too much torque tightening the rod).

Hmm, I would have been happy to find 1 inch. Maybe it was just my supplier 😀! I did a lamination on my own with gorilla glue, and it has held up so far....


Mike