Next up is to research, draw, and etch the detail on the forward end of the cone. The arrangement of access doors on the Bumper WAC differed a bit from the standard research V-2 rounds flown at White Sands, so this may take a few days.
Or months, even...
Still haven't gotten around to the doors, but I did knock out the airframe tube for the V-2 today. Having declared a personal jihad against paper tubes in all their many forms, a replacement was fashioned from a rolled sheet of .015" G10 glass. This isn't a new technique; I freely admit I stole the technique from Mike Nowak and Chris Flanigan, who have successfully used this trick on their large Saturn models.
First, a piece of .015" thick G10 sheet was sourced from ACP Composites:
https://store.acpsales.com/products/2342/fiberglass-sheets-natural
Next, a section of this sheet measuring 214mm (the height of the tube section) x 316mm (the diameter of the tube X pi) is marked and cut. The maker space through which I had access to a laser cutter went belly-up, so I had to cut this out like a common cave-dwelling savage. A 8mm-wide strip was also cut out to help back up the tube seam.
I carefully planned out how all of this was going to be clamped up once the epoxy was applied, and did a dry run. Waxed paper was taped into place to keep everything clean.
Once the clamp sequence was figured out the seam of the rolled tube section was butted together, epoxy brushed into place, and the backing strip positioned. A long caul was placed over the backing strip and the clamps where put into place. Five-minute epoxy was used.
After allowing the tube to cure for a couple of hours the clamps were removed and a bit of epoxy spoob was cleaned up from the ends of the seam. With that task out of the way the tube was test-fit with the tail and nose cones. A little bit of tape was needed to refine the fit on the tail cone, but this will work just fine.
So far I'm very pleased with the results. The seam line will eventually be hidden under a scale representation of the longitudinal airframe join strip found on actual V-2 hardware. This was quick, easy, and will certainly yield better results in less time than it would take to do the primer/sand/repeat dance that a paper tube would require.
More later,
James