airframes apogee and estes

[Zeta]

hello rocket heads!
I am sure this has been discussed before and if so please point me to the thread.....

compare and contrast the Apogee low power airframes with Estes Pro-Series air frames

Thanks !
Zeta

 

[Zeta]

are they so similar that it's a nothingburger ? is one heavier than the other ?

 

[neil_w]

Are you looking at this at a gross level, or trying to shave fractions of a gram? In general, I would expect the weight of rolled paper tubes to be dominated by the wall thickness, which is well documented on the various product pages.

 

[Scott_650]

are they so similar that it's a nothingburger ? is one heavier than the other ?

You’re not getting much/any response because unless someone has a set of PSII tubes and a good caliper to measure them with handy there’s no way to make the comparison - Estes doesn’t list the wall thickness of the PSII tubes on their website. Balsa Machining Service carries T300 tubes which are identical to the Estes PSII 3” tubes - I bought some T300 tubes to mod my Leviathan and it’s the same as the original Estes sourced tubes - and they list the wall thickness as .035”. Is that the same for the 2” and 2.5” PSII tubes? No clue - I don’t have any way to measure what I have on hand in unbuilt kits. The downside to using PSII tubes is nose cone and centering ring availability - using ”standard” BT sized tubes or LOC Precision tubing makes it much simpler finding rings, cones and reducers that fit well.

 

[neil_w]

In that case I stand corrected... I thought sure the Estes PSII tubes were fully documented.

In that case, @caveduck 's incredible OpenRocket parts database to the rescue. Here's his full page of info on body tubes: https://github.com/dbcook/openrocket-database/blob/master/data/tube_data.txt

Here's the relevant info:

Estes PSII Tubes - .034 wall (my measurement)
---------------------------------------------

SERIES    ID        OD         RingID    RingOD
                               OD+.05    ID-.05
------    -----     -----      ------    ------
29mm MMT   1.140     1.208     1.213     1.135
2.0        1.932     2.000     2.005     1.927
2.5        2.432     2.500     2.505     2.427
3.0        2.932     3.000     3.005     2.927
4.0        3.900     4.000     4.005     3.895     same as LOC tube, Mega Der Red Max

 

[Scott_650]

Thanks Neil! And caveduck! Definitely bookmarking that link - great resource.

 

[Zeta]

Thanks guys ! good digging ! ....

Zeta
~ I love the smell of CA glue in the morning