Cosmodrome Rocketry Black Brant II "Built" Thread

I'm not very good at doing build threads as with 3 small children any few seconds I get to work on rockets I spend working on rockets. I hope to get better at this in the future.

Anyway, here's a Cosmodrome Black Brant II I finished after about a year (calendar time) of work. I built it stock except for additional detailing:

• Hand-fabricated balsa scale launch lugs (front and rear)
• Scale-like screw heads made from silver Monocote and a paper punch
• Extra "CC-IIA-16" decals from Excelsior Rocketry
• 1010 Rail buttons instead of launch lugs
• 3 prism-shaped silver antenna

First of all, the quality of the parts are absolutely top-notch. The long balsa nose cone had a perfect shape that I could only make worse by finishing it. I coated it with several layers of watered-down wood glue to give it additional strength.

The parachute attachment used a wire attachment to the engine mount and a long red round elastic shock cord. The decals appear to be vinyl and I put them on using the wet method using a layer of warm water with a drop of dish soap.

The only parts that was somewhat difficult were shaping the fins. It doesn't show up very well in the picture but I spent a lot of time following Cosmodrome's instructions for all of the beveling.

I also had to re-paint the entire thing twice because the Valspar paint I used (which had a great finish) was damaged by the Tamaya tape I used to mask for the black roll pattern. This was after 2+ weeks of curing time after painting the white.

I can't wait to launch it as it looks to be a terrific flier.

I apologize for the rotation of the pictures as I couldn't figure out how to rotate them. I tried using the default Windows 8 utilities but they still showed up sideways once I uploaded them.

Brandon

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Very nice job. I even see you properly covered the motor and fin can space, I believe this was worth the year of work.. Where did you get the data for the extra decals and antennas? I been working on the fins myself, but with build-up type.

Massrokit

She's gorgeous!!!:clap:

I mainly used the attached picture, Peter Alway's Rockets of the World, the Estes kit #1958 instructions, and the FSI kit instructions to add the extra details.

I had originally planned to spray it with dullcote to give it a more realistic finish, but it's just too pretty.