Well, apparently I've reached the phase of the build where every thing I touch I destroy, sort of an anti-Midas touch. I had to wait a day before telling this particular tale of woe, until I cooled down and had a little distance. In other areas of life this would be something that I do not tell anyone about, but on these forums...
Before I go on: yes, I still have a rocket. No, I didn't throw it in the garbage, or stomp on it, or light it on fire. I did however come dangerously close to one or more of these.
It all started with a laundry shelf, one stupid little laundry shelf, as pictured in the previous posting. While waiting for some suitable weather to do my next touch-up job on the repaired control fin, I figured it was a good time to finish up the shelf.
First I glued a short piece of coupler to it, just long enough to ensure it stays straight in the tube when I push it down in there.
[Note that crossbars goes in to the tube first, because I thought that would ensure that the ejection charge could not blow off them off. Had I decided to put it in the other way, this would be very different posting.]
Anyway, I got ready to glue it in... about 9" down into the body tube. I applied the glue inside the tube with a chopstick, and got ready. Hmm, how to push that thing in there? Maybe if I use a dowel pushing along the inside of the body tube on one side... Well, that didn't work too well. It wouldn't budge past a certain point. Apparently it needed more even pressure around the perimeter of the coupler. So I tried nudging it on alternate sides, back and forth... making just a little progress, all of a sudden I heard something rattle. I looked in and one of the cross-pieces was gone. I had really glued those things in pretty well, and hadn't (I thought) hit them too hard (by accident), so how did it break out? Later examination shows that my glue joints held just fine; instead, the top layer of the plywood ring delaminated. Yay. Sorry I don't have a picture of this to show; I later threw it in the garbage with some serious gusto before it occurred to me to take a pic.
So now my laundry shelf was about 6" into the tube, and no longer useful. What to do next, I wondered as my glue was in the tube drying. Well, let's try to get that thing out. How? Well, I've always had good luck using a wire hanger as a hook. So, working more quickly than I should have, I tightened up the hook hanger hook and shoved it down there, hoping it would grab the thing and allow me to pull it out. However, I realized that the hook was a little too tight for the BT, so I tried to remove it. And here is where disaster struck: while pulling the hanger out, the end of the hook actually punctured right through the BT, and in a most inopportune location:
What happened next? Well, because this is a family-oriented forum, I cannot properly recount the dialog that ensued between myself and the powers that be. Suffice to say that it is a good thing I was alone in the house.
Apart from feeling an almost uncontrolled rage at this stupidity, I also still had to figure out what to do with the hanger stuck in the body tube and the half-broken laundry shelf stuck in there below it. I put the whole thing down for a few minutes to let my head clear, lest I do something even more foolish. Eventually I got the hanger out safely, although not before almost doing more damage to the inside of the body tube. The only think I could think to do with the laundry shelf at that point was to finish destroying it, so I took some whacks at it with my dowel until almost all the wood was gone, and eventually it just became a short piece of coupler abandoned there in the tube, no way to get it out, but also not hurting anything
After this happened I stayed out of the basement for 36 hours, not wanting to look at it or even think about it. I have not figured out what to do about the hole. Whatever type of fix I attempt will almost certainly look like crap. Fortunately(?), the second paint touch up on the control fin repair also looks like crap, so the rocket's front and rear will be balanced out.
I've tried to think about where I went wrong here. It's hard to say. Some things I just wouldn't have realized in advance, like how hard it would be to push the piece of coupler in, or that fact that the plywood centering ring would delaminate. The ability of the hanger to puncture the body tube is something I should have foreseen, but I admit at the time I was shocked. Overall, I really only take a few concrete lessons that I would pass on:
1) Be very careful trying to glue something down deep into a body tube (at least one that is too small for your hand to fit in). Glue stuff like that in advance, cutting the BT. That's how baffles are typically installed AFAIK, using them as couplers. That would be easy.
2) If you think something is going to be hard, practice it first if you can. I could have practiced pushing the shelf into a scrap piece of BT55, and would have realized immediately that it would not work, and saved myself a good bit of misery.
3) Don't take up model rocketry.
Thanks for reading, I think. Anyone want to take this thing and finish it for me, before I wreck it any further?