What did you do rocket wise today?

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Cracked open an Estes Mini A Heli. It's very weird to me that they supply the body tube as a single 18" piece plus a tube cutting guide, rather than the required 12" and 4" piece. I don't care about making the cuts, but the package ends up being a full 6" longer than necessary, and they incur the extra cost of the tube cutting guide (which admittedly probably costs them only pennies. Oh well!
But then they couldn't say "free tube cutting guide included".
Marketing, buds.
 
Opened the Horizon Models Redstone Launcher for a quick squiz and to take some measurements.

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I'm planning on building the WRESAT version.

Beautifully moulded parts.

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A little bit of photo etch.

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Microscale decals.

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Nice detail on the mouldings.

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Plenty of room for a BT-20 stuffer tube.

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Time to rough it out in Open Rocket and see what we come up with. :)
 
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Kennedy Space Center. I’m hard to please I guess. I’ll give it a meh. Would rather have seen an assembly building or launch pad area.
 

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Assembled a remote initiator system for ground testing my L3 project ejection charges. Nothing fancy... just soldered in the necessary interface on a commercial agricultural spray control (agspray #7772011). It's a 12VDC system but seems to work fine on a 2 cell LiPo.
I could do the same thing with the Eggtimer Proton, but I'd just as soon not have my avionics bouncing off the ground any more than necessary.
 
4 more launches with the kids today. 1 Alpha 3 A8-3, 1 Baby Bertha B6-4, and 2 Big Berta - 1 B6-4 and 1 C6-5, our first C engine launch ever. The Big Bertha with the C flew just barely over woods but the wind gently brought it right back, landing very close to the launch site. The winds were around 11-12 mph. All launches flew well and came back down pretty close to the launch site. Baby Bertha has a persistent issue where the parachute doesn't open up and catch the air, it stays folded. So she falls straight and fast, but no harm done.

Anyway, now we know a good rule of thumb for this launch site as far as what are acceptable conditions. 12 mph is doable....if we stay at that and below, we should have many more good launches.

That makes 10 launches, 10 recoveries for our first two outings. Not bad.
 
Sand, sand, sand!!
Worked on the SBR Li'l HoJo.
Sanded a small taper into the fins.
Forgot how tough plywood is to sand.
A new strip of #100 sandpaper in the sanding block makes a big difference.
Not scale accurate tapers but I ain't got all day. :p
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And knocked down the micro ridges on the 3D printed nose cone.
There were some deep ruts that the sandpaper cannot fix, had to use Tamiya white putty to fill them.
Needs a second round of putty, then automotive hi-fill primer.
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Assembly should be complete by tomorrow.
Cheers.
 
Technically done yesterday but I finished epoxying the fins to the motor tube and body tube on my LOC Graduator. I also 3D printed a fin alignment jig for the LOC IV. I'm toying with the idea of adding an AV bay to the Graduator. The Graduator was bought to teach me how to make a medium / high power rocket and, apparently, how much different it is to build a rocket compared to an RC aircraft... not necessarily easier. Less parts but after seeing some L2 launches I can see where attention to detail is important. I'm starting to feel good about the Graduator and a little more inspired to build the IV.
 
Finished up on a scratch build Sentinel and did the final mass/CG verification. (Yep, my masking/painting skills still needs some work). Moving on to finishing up the Dark Matter Probe later today after dealing with the winter wonderland that took up residence in my driveway.

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Installed some charge wells from Doghouse Rocketry. Redundant altimeters in a Mach1 Messier65. These are the 1.5 g. size, although they look like they'll hold more. Will measure the capacity later. I still need to purchase some eye bolts. 3/16" should be fine.
 

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Played with ammonia all day (on and off). Ammonia is a cheap and powerful cleaning product available at any good hardware store, but it also allows wood to bend and stay bent when dry. Over the last 2 days, I slowly and carefully curved a 1/8" thick balsa board into a 5.25" diameter ring. This is to be wrapped around the Smurf rocket's nose cone.
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Aside from tips I got on these forums, I relied on info from this video:
 
Estes Sasha, 2-stage with big 24mm motors. Not a scale model, but styled after Soviet SAM's. Again, no prospect for painting anytime soon. It's a small rocket for those powerful motors, especially two stages of them.

I decided to leave the fin edges square to blunt its altitude performance. A rocket this size flying to over 2000 feet is very likely just going to get lost, and to me, a failed recovery is a failed flight.

With a dozen fins and four additional wood detail pieces, I do not recommend this kit to anyone who hates sanding.

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While watching Green Bay's rather depressing performance for the NFC title, I got some stuff done.

Moved the larger rockets back off the guest bed. Space is used pretty well now.

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Put in some bamboo skewer reinforcement to the Starbiter and filled up the ebay.

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Why am I doing all this nonsense to a Star Orbiter? Because a club friend and I are drag racing on I205s!

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Looks real good with nice looking rockets to display. I ran out of room and hung most of my big rockets from the ceiling in the garage. The Nike Ajax is not finished yet.
 

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