Fliskits THUNDERBIRD (II) Build

Hi Guys,

Its been ages since I was on here. Its a loing story but I think it would be safe to say 2012 was not the best year I ever had. Mayan predictions of the End of Days would have come as a welcome relief to be frank

Over last year I didnt get a single launch off - you would not believe the bad weather and plain bad luck I have had and so my enthusiasm took a bit of a nosedive and my available time to mess about was just not there.

Undeterred though I have FINALLY started building a Fliskits Thunderbird. About a year ago I built one which was destroyed by a toxic paint job. The rocket was used though for some drop tests to destruction which gave me some useful info.

Anyway people did ask for a second build thread on this kit, I know its been a year but for anyone still interested I thought I would post. Be prepared for this to be a slow build though.

With that intro over I will start the thread....ladeez and gennelmen please take your seats

Heres stage 1 - getting a spent motor casing marked to be used as a rammer for the engine block.

A thin beaed of glue is added toi the rear of the motor casing and the engine block inserted from the front end and rammed home using the spent casing. Heres the block in position at the end of the process.

Next up is to cut a small slot for the reatining clip. I managed to get this a bit wrong and cut in a bit too close to the motor block. After the clip is done its wrapped round with a bit of masking tape.

I came up lucky here as one of the motor centreing rings nearly fouled this later on. It could have caused some trouble to a narrower masking tape might have helped.

Next up is to get the rearmost centreing ring on. This has to be positioned at the rear of the motor tube at a distance from the end of the tube thats the same as its own thickness.

What I did was but the motor tube face down on a glass table puch the ring down to the base. Then mark the ring with a tick black permanent marker to create a stencil of where the ring will go in its final position. Basically at the edge of the clear bit of tube thats not got any black markings.

Heres the tube and ring after application of the black marker.

And heres the ring installed - you can just about make out the edge of the black marker line. It also helps to gauge whether the ring is completely square to the tube.

Next up was to get the motor shrouds cut out and glued together.

Last time this area of the kit gave the most problems for one reason or another. Having learnt from last time I made some mods to the process.

Firts the parts were cut out, steamed over a kettle and folded into shape and then glued. Notice that the small central shroud has NOT had the slot of the motor retaining clip cut out. I found last time that the cut out caused the shroud to distort badly so this time I left the cut out in place and removed it later once the shroud had been glued into place. It worked quite well.

Heres the small inner shroud showing the cut out still in place.

While the other parts were drying a Fliskits Baffle was made up. I didn't take any pictures of assembly as its pretty straightforward. Here it is as a completed unit.

Here the motor tube now with the lower/inner shround attached. Light with the glue here is my opinion.

Heres the outer shroud test fitted for the upper centreing ring. This was the area that gave a lot of trouble last time. This time round it would have been troublesome too.

The instructions say that the outer shroud is dry fitted and then to use a centreing ring pushed down until its in contact with the shroud. Glue the ring in place and remove the shroud. In the instructions a second ring is fitted later to the motor and the whole lot put into the main tube up to the ring thats in contact with the shroud. The shroud is then fitted.

I just cant seem to get this right even on a second run and dont know if its me or something thats so finely tuned with the kit that a sm all deviation in makeup causes problems. Being prepared for it this time I had a cunning plan in mind.

The shhroud on test fitting with the ring worked perfectly and you can see in the pic that the shroud has some excess material on the body tube side of the ring. This excess was in fact the exact same diameter as the main tube.

What I did at this point was glue a second ring onto the motor tube to bring the edge of the shroud up to the same diamieter as the main tube. Two additional rings were added on the motor tube with some space apart to provide the motor assembl;y witrh a good grip and a good centreing on the main tube.

The bare area of motor tube seen in the pic had in the final build two rings spaced about 1.5" apart. Unfortunately I didndt get a pic of this.

The rear motor shroud was glued into position along with the additional centreing rings and then insiterd into the main tube. The very edge of one of the additional rings is seen in the join line between the shroud and main tube. THis will be filled and sanded later to get the joind completely smooth.

Atthough the assembly is 'off piste' from the instructions its come out a lot better than the first one. None of that should be taken as criticism of the kit. Other people havent had the same issues so its probably me being a Dufuss here. The kit is rated as not for the nervous

FInally with the rear shroud on the motor tube and the whole thing glued into place the main tube was marked up for its profusion of tubes and fins.

Last bit for today - the baffle tube was rammed into place - I used some long BBQ skewesr to get some glue far enough down the tube and then rammed the baffle home using a wooden spoon. Far enough down to leave space for parachute and gubbins.

It's looking good so far!! And welcome back to the forums - I'm sorry to hear you didn't have a great 2012. 2013 will be your year!!

Welcome back AB! The replacement build looks great so far. Best wishes for a great 2013. I appreciate your detailed and insightful comments!

I once saw this movie where an old dude knocked a glass of wine off the table while eating alone in some fancy room. He just looked at the broken pieces of glass and spilled red wine. Then in an instant he seemed to get a lot older, but then it was all so clear to him. Maybe it is the same for you looking at the broken pieces of Thunderbird I and with the launch of Thunderbird II something wonderful will happen.

Well hey! It's good to see the UK Rep back! I look forward to seeing this one. I had one, mucked-it -up and never ordered another. I need to do so.
Welcome back!

Thanks for the welcome back guys......Steve this kit is not an easy one for sure, its no build in a day job. The last one took ages. But its very sayisfying in many ways. Even badly built last time it still looked ok - if it werent for problems with the paint I would have been happy.

This time I will be using acrylic only paints, every headache with finishing so far has been down to enamel paints

I thought I'd quickly create a diagram to show how I ended up fitting the motor and shroud gubbins together. THis is the bit of the kit which gave me the most problems last time. Heres how it was done in cross section - the drawings omit some of motor tube bits and the rear end of the shroud for clarity - sorry they arent great I only have powerpoint on this PC - the grey bits are the centreing rings.


EDIT: Because of problems last time with the shroud when I ordered the kit up again for a second go at it I ordered up some extra centreing rings from Fliskits for this build. I only needed an extra two as things worked out.

Outboard booster tubes marked up using template.......

Outboard booster nosecones. Like the motor shrouds these were cut out, steamed and rolled round a pencil to get them nice and smoothly round.

I just glued these onto the respective tabs rather than the more complex method of mating them face to face with a fillet behind them. I did that on the first build and found it was a lot more hassle to build for no real advantage in finishing.

The nose cones are mated onto some tube thats slightly smaller than the outboard booster tubes. These have to be cut in two and the ends marked so you use the squarest end....my cutting was so rough I think I could have guessed which was the 'true' end

Finally the nosecones with their mated tubes are glued and pushed into the outboard booster tubes with their join line in line with one of the booster tube lines.

Its a fiddly job to get these right....they will need a bit of filling and sanding to get them smooth later on.

Next up was the base of the booster tubes (note here I am not doing the instructions in quite the same order) I am freelancing a bit and working on stuff that I can do today....I ran out of wood filler/balasa filler so am working on the base assembly rather than fine polishing stuff.

The base of the boosters are made from sone small rings which have a balsa base. Once glued the balsa is sanded smooth to the shape of the ring and then inserted into the bottom of the booster tubes. I put glue on and then forced the ring down inside the booster against a flat surface to make sure the end of the booster is square to the tube and flush.

Next up is the booster rocket bells at the end of the tube. Like the other paper parts these were cut out, steamed, rolled and glued.

I found when builing this kit the first time these were hellish to get glued onto the base of the booster tubes later as theres so little contact area and last time I ended up putting some small balsa circles down the cones to give them a better grip. This time I decided to make life even easier by pre -assembling an inner disk of balsa to the cones.

Heres the cones being assembled, balsa being cut out and finally the balsa ends glued into place.

Gluing was done by holding the balsa disk down with a small screwdriver to hold it flat while the cone was glued and then pressed into place making sure it was flush with the balsa disk.

These will need filling and sanding later on to get them right but they look pretty neat even now.

At least this time round I have a better idea where I am going and have already picked the finsish for the kit (it will be white with yellow booster nose cones, black main nose cone and with RAF roundels cos I am itching to use some do it yourself decals I got for another project )

Heheheehe... I love your thoroughness and have missed it.

Astro-Baby said:

Hi Guys,

Its been ages since I was on here. Its a loing story but I think it would be safe to say 2012 was not the best year I ever had. Mayan predictions of the End of Days would have come as a welcome relief to be frank

Click to expand...

Wondered more than once if you were somehow put off or run off by ppl here. Or simply found other things to do. Nice to see you back. Be well.

op:op:op::handshake:

Not a bit of it Jeff.... peeps here were nice as can be Lots nicer than on some forums I can tell you.

Long story is...well a long story. Havent launched anything because the weather here last year had to be seen to be believed. Wettest on record, blowing a gale most days, sunny clear days were few and far between and never at weekends......kind of lost the will to live at times As you know I do astronomy as well...we have had three straight months of cloud where I live so thats been blown out as a hobby for a while.

I was hoping to fly two rockets last year...took two camping holidays and on both of them it rained non stop or was blowing a gale or both.

Sighs

This TB kit has been sat in my hobby box for almost 12 months. Thought it was about time I got on with it

But thanks guys for the generous welcome back.

Mel

Moving on, I havent had a lot of time this week as I am writing other stuff.

Time to get the fins moving on TB2. There are a lot of them. I have to say this is the bit I like the least with building, cutting out fins. Actually I dont mind cutting them out its all the faff of making the templates and marking them up. This took what is known in Outer Mongolia as 'a very long time'

All of the fins were cut from the stock balsa supplied with the kit and templated with the card templates also supplied. Finally once they were cut out they were held together and sanded to make sure they all have the same basic outline.

The first pic shows the main fins now sanded to a uniform size and shape.

Next up was to mark up the fins for the areas that will be sanded down. Thunderbird has quite complex fin shapes and to make the kit look good the edges of the fins have to be profiled quite exactly. Last time round I measured up the fin markings but this time I though 'hey stupid, just make a paper template up' - it worked well. In the second pic a fin is having its sanding marking lines applied.

In the third pic I am using a piece of scrap balsa exactly half the thickness of the fin balsa to get a line down the edge of the fin to act as a guide for profiling the fin. I found it hard last time to assess how much had been taken off from each side. This time I was resolved to be a bit more accurate.

First pic shows a fin marked up with its centreline from using the scrap balsa as a guide - this one isnt perfect but it give you the idea and picture 2 shows the fins all cut out, sanded to basic shape and marked up ready for some more sanding. As you can see Thunderbird has a lot of fins.

By the time I got this far I was ready for a break. In later pictures you can see that my thumb (miraculously) still looks like a thumb although my nails have now been wrecked between doing this kit and fixing my sisters telescope mount.

To get the sharp crease lines on the fins where the profiling starts the fins were masked off with some heavy masking tape and then sanded to shape using an emery board (I have loads of these for my nails - no idea why as my nails are always a mess )

Heres a fin being sanded and finally the whole set of fins sanded and filled and sanded again ready to install on the tube. I was planning on doing all of the fins in one go but by the time I had these four finished I wanted a change of pace and to do something else.

Sanding is quite gutty work I find and although I love to think of myself as a master craftswoman the truth is I am pretty lazy and get bored quite fast.