Tower for Estes Honest John...

With the Little Joe II build behind me, the new Estes Honest John kit somehow slid onto my workbench last night. This is another remarkably well engineered kit from Estes, and so far the model has gone together very quickly. The launch lugs kinda bugged me, though, so I decided to resize the Illustrator file used to laser-cut a tower base that I've used with my FAI Bumper WAC scale altitude models. The Bumper models were sized at 71mm to accommodate their 69mm airframes, so it was a simple matter to resize the artwork to 56mm to fit the ~54mm Honest John nose cone. I cut the tower parts today and assembled the tower base to check the fit...



I made one minor error: the fins will not fit through the spider at the top of the tower rails, as I failed to accurately measure the fin span of the finished model. That's an easy fix, though, and it will be simple to resize the artwork and cut a new part.



As an FYI, there is more info concerning the tower base on the NAR website at: https://www.nar.org/contest-flying/fai-spacemodeling/construction-techniques/tower-launchers/

I used a photo tripod as a tower base for years, but switched to a short microphone stand recently.

The push is on to get the model ready to fly at the next Austin Area Rocketry Group launch.

James

That looks interesting. The nose of the Honest John (or similar rockets) being wider than the body makes for difficulty with launch lugs. I've seen one with the lower lug mounted on a fin to avoid using a standoff. I'd like to hear how this works out.

Hmmm, really, I thought the rail standoffs on my Madcow 5.5"/4" Honest John made the whole rocket look more scale-like. I used the nice machined ones from Dog House Rocketry.

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showt...rofiling-(AFTER-THE-FACT)&p=700025#post700025

https://doghouse.blastzone.org/rail-button-standoffs.html