Making Port Hole Balsa Rings – Step 1 – Cutting Out Balsa Disks
Handy:
Now that we have windows and back drops, we can make the O-rings! In this picture, you can see the stacks we’ll fit inside the port holes.
- A 1/16-inch thin balsa spacer, because we want a stack to protrude beyond the nose cone surface so we can then sand it down to be flush with it. These thin spacers can be cut out with scissors.
- A colored back drop, and we chose sky blue, the color most likely to match a flyable sky, and that matches our comic book perfectly.
- An acrylic window.
- A 1/4-inch thick balsa disk, that we’ll turn into a ring in the next step, and eventually sand down to be flush with the cone surface.
To make the 1/4-inch thick disks, we just used a 1.5-inch diameter hole saw through a 1/4-inch thick balsa board. The disks it cuts out are just what we need to start off O-rings!
Clumsy:
Gee! This is getting kind of complicated!
Making Port Hole Balsa Rings – Step 2 – Turning the Disks into Rings
Handy:
To turn the disks into rings, we used a rotary tool with a sanding band bit. Starting and finishing measurements were:
- 1-1/2-inch O.D. disks,
- 1-1/4-inch O.D. rings, with 1-inch I.D.
The 1-1/4-inch O.D. is for fitting inside the holes we drilled in the nose cone, and the 1-inch I.D. is for accepting removable disks with different colors. So only the permanent, flight worthy, sky-blue back drops have to be 1-1/4-inch in diameter All the other colors have to be on 1-inch disks instead, so that they can fit inside these new ring.
Clumsy: Gosh! But how will we remove a disk if it gets stuck in the port hole?
Handy: We can use a suction cup!
Clumsy: A what?
Jokey (off-screen): A smurfer to smurf out smurfables! Hee-argh!! Yuk!! Yargy Yarg!!
Handy:
Jokey’s actually right… On this picture, you can see a stack for each one of the 4 colors, and the rotary bit we used to make the balsa rings:
Clumsy:
Ohhhh … I still don’t get it Handy.
Handy:
Well, it'll be easier to see when we put it all on the nose cone!