In some parts of the country (like where I grew up in the Southwest) a closed car on a warm day can reach 150 degrees pretty quickly. That will certainly soften some water-based glue joints.
But the reason I popped back into this thread was because I wanted to post about a shock cord that is nearly 53 years old and still good. The attached horrible quality scan shows a junior high school friend (David Ridgley, on the left) and I setting up a rocket launch under the auspices of the Shiprock Jr. High Science Club. The picture appeared in the October 29th, 1968 issue of the Farmington (NM) Daily Times. While the scan is lousy, this version was clear enough for me to recognize both the model and the launch pad. And as it turns out, I still have this model....a BT-20-based streamer-recovery model that was probably my first original design. I found it in one of my model boxes and pulled it out after I was able to recognize it in this picture. It has a length of 1/8 inch Sig contest rubber (for rubber powered model airplanes) installed in it as the shock cord, using the two-slits-and-a-knot shock cord attachment method that predates the tri-fold.
After getting it out and giving it a tug, and after recognizing that the pad in the picture is my original Tilt-a-Pad (which I also still have) instead of the Electro-Launch I thought I'd been using (from an even worse scan of that article), I decided to set the model and the pad up at Sixty Acres and fly it again. So after more than 52 years Nameless One I took flight again on March 30th of this year on an A8-5 and turned in a very nice flight. And that half-century old piece of rubber shock cord did not break. [John Boren isn't the only one who thinks naming a rocket is one of the hardest parts....and my 7th grade self was just as bad at it as I am now, if not worse.]
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