I still haven't painted or papered my Roes-a-roc, but I did do a mod that I thought I'd share.
The instructions have you glue in the rubber and I was afraid that if the rubber broke due to age or accident, it would be difficult to replace. Or impossible. There is an option given in the instructions for pins to be stuck into the nose so you can replace the rubber bands as needed but I wasn't sure I'd like that method either.
I was inspired by lessgravity's mod where he used bent pins
in this thread. But I didn't want to use pins either.
I took the leftover strip of balsa and cut a 1/4" long piece and a 3/8" piece. From the longer piece I cut two corners off leaving a 1/8" section sticking out. I used white glue to stick them together and pressed them against the nose cone so they'd dry curved to fit even though they weren't being attached to the nose yet. When dried I used lots of CA to harden the balsa, especially the tip sticking up. When I had three of these I then used white glue to attach them to the nose cone, lining them up with the blades.
Then I created another three of these, but this time didn't curve them, and used CA to attach them to the blades. I tried white glue first but since this area of the blades had already been hardened with CA it didn't stick very well. So I used a puddle of CA and when that cured these things were permanent.
I bought a bag of small white rubber bands at a hobby store and stretch 2 on each set. In this picture you can see the closest blade folded in half and bent down into launch position while the other two are being held up.
And here all three blades are folded and bent down.
If you look really close you'll see the remains of some issues I had with one of the hinge wires breaking. I fixed it but it left a couple of dangling wires that do nothing.
I made a short video of the blades popping up into place but wasn't happy since it didn't really show the whole rocket well enough. I'll make another one soon and post a GIF or something here. This seems to work really well! I was worried that the rubber bands might pop off the blades when it flew open but after a dozen or so tests nothing like that has happened. If the little tabs to break off I'll just glue on another layer with a full width tab, which is what I probably should have done to begin with, and never cut off the corners. The real test will be when I try to fly it. If it spins properly I'll be happy. I'm not entering any contests for longest flights with it.
I'm still debating on painting the nose and fins, and papering the blades, so it will look a *little* like a Saturn V when folded down for launch.