MAC BlackFly build thread

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Tobor said:
So I started on my BF last Friday. washing and sanding airframe, lightly sanded MMT and epoxied MMT to CR, then CR to airframe.

Saturday I worked on sanding the tailcone then applied a layer of 30 minute epoxy (mixed with a healthy portion of microballoons) to it.

Sunday evening I had a little time to sand down the epoxy coat on the tailcone.

Today I drilled the airframe for the rear rail guide. Then I prepped the fins and used JB Weld to attach them to the MMT.

View attachment 343303
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Nice to see another BlackFly in the larva stage, I am looking forward to seeing the black/blue/red paint scheme come to life. Are you planning on using any electronics, if so what are you thinking for the setup?
 
Sigh...I spent my money on the 54mm Black fly before the larger kits came out. Wish I could have waited to get the 3" one.
 
mike2wander said:
"SuperFly" just sighted in Upstate NY :y:

View attachment 343320 View attachment 343321
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Sweet!!!

XL Rocket envy.......

mpitfield said:
Nice to see another BlackFly in the larva stage, I am looking forward to seeing the black/blue/red paint scheme come to life. Are you planning on using any electronics, if so what are you thinking for the setup?
Click to expand...


Thanks. When the funds start flowing again I will acquire a JLCR to start with. Then later down the road I'd like to get my feet wet with some form of electronics deployment. Ultimately I want to start working on my Teensy project. Hoping I can get the Teensy to do everything except wash dishes.
 
DeepOvertone said:
Mike what size is that one??? Drool!
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Super Fly is 6" diameter, 75" tall with a 75 mount and weighs 14 lbs. empty. The airframe is BlueTube. It's been amazing to see how the whole BlackFly thing has caught on, and Thanks everyone for the support. The plan is to fly it in June at URRF5 in Potter NY on an "M".
 
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mpitfield said:
I have a sim file for an 8" Ultra BlackFly with a 98mm MMT, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. I will likely go for it in a few years but not right now.
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Some Sano tube, 4oz fiberglass, and plywood and you have yourself an Ultrafly.
 
So looking over some material costs, I've decided to build an 8" Black Fly. I'm going to pick up some more plywood and some 8" Sano tube for it. I've got in my amazon cart the 4oz fiberglass and some 2 mil Mylar to try my hand at laminating the airframe. In the meantime I mapped out the fins on some 1/2" birch ply I had lying around. Once I cut them out I will post pictures. What is a good epoxy to use for laminating airframe? I might as well laminate the fins too, just for some practice and to stiffen them up. This will be my first attempt at laminating anything, so I'm just going to use some heavy things. I know it's not as good, but I don't want to spend all my money on the vacuum bagging equipment.
 
mperegrinefalcon said:
So looking over some material costs, I've decided to build an 8" Black Fly. I'm going to pick up some more plywood and some 8" Sano tube for it. I've got in my amazon cart the 4oz fiberglass and some 2 mil Mylar to try my hand at laminating the airframe. In the meantime I mapped out the fins on some 1/2" birch ply I had lying around. Once I cut them out I will post pictures. What is a good epoxy to use for laminating airframe? I might as well laminate the fins too, just for some practice and to stiffen them up. This will be my first attempt at laminating anything, so I'm just going to use some heavy things. I know it's not as good, but I don't want to spend all my money on the vacuum bagging equipment.
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Look up mccordmw's 3/4 PAC-3 L3 build. He used an adhesion promoter to deal with the sketchy surface of the Sonotube. Good luck!
 
mperegrinefalcon said:
So looking over some material costs, I've decided to build an 8" Black Fly. I'm going to pick up some more plywood and some 8" Sano tube for it. I've got in my amazon cart the 4oz fiberglass and some 2 mil Mylar to try my hand at laminating the airframe. In the meantime I mapped out the fins on some 1/2" birch ply I had lying around. Once I cut them out I will post pictures. What is a good epoxy to use for laminating airframe? I might as well laminate the fins too, just for some practice and to stiffen them up. This will be my first attempt at laminating anything, so I'm just going to use some heavy things. I know it's not as good, but I don't want to spend all my money on the vacuum bagging equipment.
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I prefer peel-ply to Mylar.
https://www.uscomposites.com/vacuum.html

Also I like US Composites 635 Resin (3:1) for laminating.
https://www.uscomposites.com/epoxy.html
 
I am not even sure that the 29mm outboards would do much including adding any additional flame or smoke as compared to a 98mm center. I would probably keep it simple and stick with a center 98mm, whcih would be plenty for that size airframe, if you can keep the weight down. To keep the weight down you might look at using some pre-preg carbon sheets to wrap the sono tube, but then I am not sure how practical that would be for post curing.
 
mpitfield said:
I am not even sure that the 29mm outboards would do much including adding any additional flame or smoke as compared to a 98mm center. I would probably keep it simple and stick with a center 98mm, whcih would be plenty for that size airframe, if you can keep the weight down. To keep the weight down you might look at using some pre-preg carbon sheets to wrap the sono tube, but then I am not sure how practical that would be for post curing.
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I think I'm just going to go for 1 wrap of 4oz fiberglass on the tubes. Just to stiffen it up. That should make it strong enough. If it doesn't then I can always add another layer. Your right about the 5x 29mm. They only add about 2,000 feet altitude for the flight. I want to put an AT M1075DM motor in it, and since I want to try my hand at a cluster I want to put 2 29mm outboards on it. I might even see about air starting them. I know they won't add much in terms of preformance, but it costs me like $12 to include them and doesn't add particularly much weight to the rocket. (~30 grams of cardboard +epoxy, so maybe a total of 50 grams or so). In order to keep the cost of this kit down I'm wanting to cut my own centering rings and bulkheads. I'm thinking some .5" birch ply for the motor mount strengthened with 4oz fiberglass and and some plywood supports. I was thinking I would use the nosecone coupler as my av bay, and store the parachute in the nosecone and have it attached by 5 4-40 shear pins, and have some 1/2" kevlar and a 96" fruity chutes Iris ultra to keep the weight down.

This is my first big project, and so any suggestions are welcome.
 
I would say for a first big project, keep it simple. Drop the outboards. The rings and fins probably don't need glass. Maybe the fins. Half inch Birch ply is probably sufficient for flight, but for durability, the glass will help with landings.

As far as clustering, don't ever light small motors as part of a cluster that can't on their own safely fly the rocket on the pad. If the main central motor is slow to pressurize, the rocket will leave the pad far too slow, potentially resulting in a horizontal flight, or worse. Air starting outboards is the only safe way to fly small motors as part of clusters. You could do it as soon as launch is detected, if you want them to right away. The other way to do clusters is to light multiple motors that could all each fly the rocket individually, all on the pad. So a cluster of two or three motors is okay if each of them have a safe thrust to weight ratio, etc. if they are the only one to light.
 
mperegrinefalcon said:
I think I'm just going to go for 1 wrap of 4oz fiberglass on the tubes. Just to stiffen it up. That should make it strong enough. If it doesn't then I can always add another layer. Your right about the 5x 29mm. They only add about 2,000 feet altitude for the flight. I want to put an AT M1075DM motor in it, and since I want to try my hand at a cluster I want to put 2 29mm outboards on it. I might even see about air starting them. I know they won't add much in terms of preformance, but it costs me like $12 to include them and doesn't add particularly much weight to the rocket. (~30 grams of cardboard +epoxy, so maybe a total of 50 grams or so). In order to keep the cost of this kit down I'm wanting to cut my own centering rings and bulkheads. I'm thinking some .5" birch ply for the motor mount strengthened with 4oz fiberglass and and some plywood supports. I was thinking I would use the nosecone coupler as my av bay, and store the parachute in the nosecone and have it attached by 5 4-40 shear pins, and have some 1/2" kevlar and a 96" fruity chutes Iris ultra to keep the weight down.

This is my first big project, and so any suggestions are welcome.
Click to expand...

Upfront, I have not launched and recovered anything over a 4" airframe. Although I have an 8" project with a 150 MMT, which is more like a 161mm MMT, that I am working on. However one thing I have observed from successful recovery techniques on big projects is that they often employ different techniques than smaller sized HP projects. Do you have an idea of your final weight? I did some really rough numbers and was thinking that the descending weight using the AT hardware for the M1075 DM would be around the 55lb mark.

One technique I have seen on bigger projects is a "free-bag" technique. This is when the nosecone and the rest of the rocket part ways on main deployment. This reduces your overall final mass so you can use smaller chutes. The main is deployed using a pilot, which becomes the main for the nosecone, assuming it is sized appropriately for the mass of the nosecone. It does this by pulling a deployment bag off of the main, but the deployment bag that is not attached to the main so the sections of the airframe go off in different directions. This is just one way and it does have some concerns from my review.

Recovery harness and hardware I typically talk to Teddy from OneBadHawk and get his input. Chutes I also use Fruity and take Gene's advice.

For my 8" project I will be using the Peregrine Raptor as well as the free bag system and possibly an ARRD so I can use my pilot as a drogue. However this project is not a priority for me at this point so by the time I get into the recovery side my experience and realizations may lead me down a different path.

In regards to the 29mm outboards I am not confident that they will have any real world appreciable effect on the performance of a rocket this big and design. I think it may even be more of a hassle.

One other comment in regards to these large projects. Where I can I am going to use carbon fiber in an effort to both strengthen and reduce mass. Of course this could make a reasonable priced big project turn into a more unreasonably priced project but if it provides better performance and a tougher airframe then that is the price that has to be paid.
 
I would if I could afford to build it with the carbon fiber cloth. I am just going to use the 4oz glass cloth for the layup on the tube and fins because it's a third the price of CF. That's a good idea for the nosecone to come down on it's own. Although with the flight on the M1075DM simming to about 7,000 feet, I am concerned that I would have a hard time locating the cone without a second tracker. Looking at the decent rate calculator, a iris ultra 72" parachute would get me about 20fps. If I just deployed this at apogee then from the predicted 7,000 feet it would just take about 6 minutes to descend. I'm thinking this could be a bit safer to do, and still be fairly easy to find. If the wind at the launch is 15 mph, then is should land about 3800 feet away, but more realistically the wind would be about 10 mph, which would mean it would land about 2500 feet away. If there is a good reason not to do this, I am certainly open to other ideas, but this seams pretty easily doable. How long are 1515 rail? I would want to go with about at LEAST and 84" rail. That puts it's velocity off the rail at 15.2 m/s which should be plenty to make it stable. Once I actually start building I will start a separate build thread, for now its just the planning phase. I want to get everything well planned and ready to go for when I start building. For the main body tube section, the sanotube is only 48" long and I need a 57" piece for it. My current plan is to cut it to 43" and the second Sanotube to 15". I will use a 12" piece cut from the leftovers, and split it down the middle. I will then dry fit it into the body tube, and mark where it overlaps and cut off the excess. I will then epoxy that inside the main tube and set it to cure. I will then fit the upper portion of Sanotube to the top of this make-shift coupler and epoxy that in place. This should make one very strong joint, especially after I cover the whole thing in fiberglass.
 
At 7000 ft, this could just about be visual tracking with a bird this size. If you did dual deploy, I wouldn't worry about tracking, even with the nosecone coming off at low altitude. I personally would try to get dual deploy in this somehow. That could be a chute cannon in the nose, or a more traditional setup. I would only worry about bringing the nose down separate unless it needs significant nose weight. You don't have to do a deployment bag at all. 55 pounds had been done without one successfully. That was about what my largest project came in at, and I still haven't used one.

Speaking of your nosecone, how do you plan on making it? Are you making a tailcone as well?

If you're club has a tower pad on a trailer, it could be as much as 10 ft of rail. Check this now while you are in the planning stages. Also check if it has 1515 rail or uni-strut.
 
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AdAstraPerAspera said:
At 7000 ft, this could just about be visual tracking with a bird this size. If you did dual deploy, I wouldn't worry about tracking, even with the nosecone coming off at low altitude. I personally would try to get dual deploy in this somehow. That could be a chute cannon in the nose, or a more traditional setup. I would only worry about bringing the nose down separate unless it needs significant nose weight. You don't have to do a deployment bag at all. 55 pounds had been done without one successfully. That was about what my largest project came in at, and I still haven't used one.

Speaking of your nosecone, how do you plan on making it? Are you making a tailcone as well?

If you're club has a tower pad on a trailer, it could be as much as 10 ft of rail. Check this now while you are in the planning stages. Also check if it has 1515 rail or uni-strut.
Click to expand...

Madcow has an 8" 5:1 ogive nosecone I plan on using. It will be the most expensive part of his build, for the airframe at least. The motor is a bit more then it. The tailcone I have been thinking about, and I'm thinking to keep it light so I don't have a giant block of wood on the tail of my rocket, I will make a frame of wood and harvest some cardboard from the leftover body tube and use that to make the tailcone, which would be then be coated in fiberglass cloth. I could also do a balsa build up to make it, with again some fiberglass coating.
 

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