5.5" Cherokee-D L3 build thread for rharshberger

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This is just my method, John Coker has an excellent video on his site about another method of doing them.

I will watch that tonight. However, i'd suggest your methods are pretty darned sound! I've used quite a bit I've learned from you so far! Thanks for that.
 
Did some more work this evening. Installed screws on the Av-Bay hatchcover and installed the railbuttons. The hole in the center of the hatch is a pilot hole for one of the static ports, of which there will be three each in line with a fin. The forward most rail button appears to be off, but the tube is slightly twisted off center, all the railbuttons actually line up.


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Nearing the home stretch now, all the fasteners are in the Av-Bay and epoxied in place. The shear pin holes are drilled in the motor section and the forward payload bay shear pin holes are drilled and tapped. The shear plates are installed in the motor section (pieces of 1/4" aluminum rod countersunk into the zipperless couplers CR, as soon as the epoxy cures I will drill them out, photos to come). Static ports are drilled and cleaned up. The only major parts left are the final shear plate drilling, external fillets, adding the charge wells and priming and painting, and of course ground testing.

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Today was a really strong day even with all the interruptions, we had three appointments and a run to drop some stuff at the storage unit. First up was charge wells and wire pass thru ports (well nuts), the charge wells are 1" fiberglass rod drilled out with 5/8" drill bit, and yes they are heavy (all four weigh in at 7oz total). The fillets were actually the last thing of the day, the structural ones are done tomorrow I will add the microballon modified epoxy fillets. First coat of primer is on the rest of the airframe, quite a bit of filling to do, probably using extra epoxy from the cosmetic part of the fillets, I also while doing the first fillets used some of the extra epoxy to fill a few depressions on the fins. The last photo is a shear pin "plate", its actually a piece of 1/4" aluminum round stock countersunk into the top centering ring on the zipperless coupler and drilled out, once the epoxy sets tomorrow I will drill the hole all the way through into the motor tube, so that sheared pins can be pushed through and fall out of the rocket. So far the weight of the rocket is only about 1.8lbs over the OR design estimation of 29lbs (currently its at 30.8lbs), only thing missing from the weight I believe is 5 quicklinks, 2 swivels, the D-bag, paint, the drogue and D-bag chutes, all of that probably will add about 2 more pounds. I can almost certainly say that April 9th will be the first check flight on a AT L1000W 54mm DMS motor at the TriCities Rocketeers April launch.


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Rich, do you have to remove all those screws on hatch cover to arm/disarm altimeters or am I missing something?
 
Rich, do you have to remove all those screws on hatch cover to arm/disarm altimeters or am I missing something?

I won't, some of them will be cut off and epoxied to be just for looks, only the four corners will be functioning. I liked the look of 8 originally but after several removal and replacement of the hatch cycles it was a pain, even with a electric screwdriver. I may even modify the hatch cover a bit more and add two smaller holes to access the screw switches inside.
 
Red stuff everywhere....filling low spots and creating the cosmetic fillets over the ugly structural fillets I did last night. The filler is US Composites 635 epoxy with lots of phenolic microballoons added, all the layers are pretty thin. The edges of the fins have been "painted" with straight epoxy to seal them, tomorrow evening there will be a lot of sanding going on. This is definitely going to be a 10' finish initially, eventually/or not I will go back and make it a up close and personal type finish. What looks like a raised area around the edges of the fin is actually the wet epoxy from the sealing. I anyone is actually curious there are over 300 photos of the build as it progressed.

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Which hardener did you use with that Rich? I saw their 2:1 needs to be used with temps over 80. I'd assume the 3:1 or 4:1?
 
Which hardener did you use with that Rich? I saw their 2:1 needs to be used with temps over 80. I'd assume the 3:1 or 4:1?

I use the 3:1 and its easy to work with, now that I have experience working with the epoxy I will probably switch to the faster epoxy. The temps are right on, I like working in my shop during the winter which is hard to get over 60°F the 3:1 will cure at that temp but it takes forever, so I put the assembled pieces into the insulated storage/hobby room with a small electric heater and crank the temp up to about 100°F the epoxy cures in about half the time.
 
Easy change to the arm/disarm of the altimeters. I normally do them this way anyways, but I decided that removing any screws to access the bay at the pad was more trouble than it was worth. The white tubes are made from nesting Plastruct plastic tubing, after the screwdriver is inserted through the hatch cover the internal bushing (inside the tube) guide the tip straight to the arm/disarm screw. If I didn't mention it already the screw switches are from Missleworks. The interior of the Av-Bay is HUGE, I could do all kinds of things with it.

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Easy change to the arm/disarm of the altimeters. I normally do them this way anyways, but I decided that removing any screws to access the bay at the pad was more trouble than it was worth. The white tubes are made from nesting Plastruct plastic tubing, after the screwdriver is inserted through the hatch cover the internal bushing (inside the tube) guide the tip straight to the arm/disarm screw. If I didn't mention it already the screw switches are from Missleworks. The interior of the Av-Bay is HUGE, I could do all kinds of things with it.

View attachment 287030 View attachment 287031

Super,, super,, super slick....
Very cool Rich....
This is called the anti hunt and peck technique....

Teddy
 
Especially Teddy when there are a total of 3 possible screws to hit on each switch without the guides.

That's funny..
Just when I'm about ready to rip / borrow a great idea like this,,,
The switches that I like to use go wireless.......lol...

Teddy
 
That's funny..
Just when I'm about ready to rip / borrow a great idea like this,,,
The switches that I like to use go wireless.......lol...

Teddy

Not sure how well received the Eggtimer Wifi switches would be for a NAR L3 cert flight, Cris makes awesome products but as there is no manually operated switch ( read as old school) it might not be allowed for this flight, afterwards however I will be acquiring several for my various electronics setups. I also don't have time to seek approval and get the wifi switches before the flight.
 
Here's Rich's test flight today at tri-cities on a DMS L-1000, excellent flight, nominal recovery.

Frank

[video=youtube_share;fafEitsQZJ4]https://youtu.be/fafEitsQZJ4[/video]
 
Here's Rich's test flight today at tri-cities on a DMS L-1000, excellent flight, nominal recovery.

Frank

[video=youtube_share;fafEitsQZJ4]https://youtu.be/fafEitsQZJ4[/video]

Thanks for posting the video, and pass on to Max he did an awesome job on it. Now I have to paint and decal the monster....since its earned it.

Its also time to do a few shout outs to the suppliers who I have dealt with to make this process successful so far (in no particular order) OneBadHawk for the custom harnesses, Jim Amos for the Missleworks RRC3, Cris Erving for the Eggtimer TRS doing tracking duty and the Eggtimer Quark riding shotgun on recovery (this was both products first flight today), Balsa Machining Service for the awesome customer service, for the motors (L1000DMS, and M1297W), Loc Precision for the airframe components, US Composites, Soller Composites, FiberGlass Supply, ACP Composites, Hobbyking for the Lipo's, my local HobbyTown USA, Pacific Steel for the CNC cut thrust plates, Eric Cayemberg for the used Cert3Large I acquired from him in the yard sale he posted, and I may have missed one or two unintentionally, however top of the list is my wife for not only making two of the 3 chutes on this flight (drogue and nosecone/d-bag pilot) and repairing the minor tears and burn spots on the Cert3Large, but she also had to put up with the stress of dealing with me over the last two weeks as I tried to get this project ready for today's flight. The hard part hopefully is done now its onto finishing the paperwork and making the actual cert flight.
 
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Well done Rich. you will absolutely deserve the L3 with all the craftsmanship you've put into this! Congrats on the successful maiden voyage!
 
Smokin flight Rich,,
on the money without a hitch....

Congrats on the level 3 man....lol...

Teddy
 
I know,,,,

Git it,,,,lol...

Teddy

Your predicting the future, right? :) I hope so, last weekends flight was a blast and the harnesses worked great. The only thing I would have changed was using a 3-loop for the main as well, since my d-bag and its pilot chute is attached to the nosecone along with the harness so everything stays together. I know its not as ideal as a true freebag setup but it worked great.
 
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Looked great, now paint that bird and get it ready for the big one!

Very cool your wife had a part in it as well
 
Looked great, now paint that bird and get it ready for the big one!

Very cool your wife had a part in it as well

Thanks Nick.

Back at work on the beast, the nose cone has received its first coat of red paint ( Walmart HomeShades brand, its cheap and I have had excellent results with it), tomorrow it should be hard enough for a 600grit light sanding and then another coat, the lower payload bay tube and the Av-Bay have received a coat of white Duplicolor primer after a 400grit sanding. The Upper Payload bay used the last of my Rustoleum and Duplicolor hi-filler primers, so its off to WalMart tomorrow to get two more cans, should be the last two cans of filler primer an most of it will be sanded off. The fin/booster section received the same 400 grit sanding to remove most of the existing primer, and then the last VERY thin spots of BSG putty were applied, of which almost all of it will be sanded off, since I was just filling little blems in the primer. One of the members of my club was kind enough to lend me a B2 Rocketry Cert3 XL to use in place of my Cert3 Large, the descent rate of the Cert3 Large was 21fps, which while good isn't as soft of touchdown as I want in an unknown area. No pictures today, I will try and get some tomorrow since at this stage its mostly primer, color coats may start going on tomorrow though, on the rest of the airframe.

Thanks for the support of my enablers here on TRF and my home club as well, you guys and gals are awesome.
 
Hey, I'm with you guy's...
It's just great when my wife comes to launches and / or helps me with a rocket...
Her whole hand and arm fit down a 3" tube !!!
Now ya just can't beat that,,, lol...

Teddy
 
Last coat of primers should be on, tomorrow will hopefully be the last of the sanding on the primer coat. The nose cone now has two coats of red, and will get another one tomorrow, which should finish up the nosecone. The paint job will definitely not be a "one incher" but more like a "10 footer" which is okay by me it will still look great when fully painted and decal-ed.

Screenshot of RRC3 data included for those interested.
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No work planned on the beast for the next week due to a remodel of our house prior to putting it up for sale. However I was able to order the vinyl from Mark at Stickershock23 with only very minor changes. The only changes from the original decals is to the "D-power" which will be changed to "98mm Power", and some Arm decals with directional arrows for the hatch cover. My new charge wells arrived yesterday as well to replace the experimental fiberglass rod ones that failed. John does beautiful work.


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Okay, Certification Packet has been submitted, with only minutes to go for the 30days before launch. Most of the delay was only having a couple of hours each night for the last few days to work on the paperwork, and fumbling my way through OpenOffice Writer, then resolving the issues of scanning the documents (the packet was made up of 3 different documents, that would not play nice with each other due to differences in formatting). The entire document only came to 27 pages. :y:
 
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