Culprit
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2015
- Messages
- 151
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- 137
This scratch build began with my son taking a knife to a Nerf football and stuffing it into a Tootsie Roll tube coin bank - a small one. He brought it to breakfast and told me he wanted to turn it into the Chocolate Rocket. He sourced some tube fins from the Rolo candy cane tubes you see at Christmas. From there, he and I joined forces and it became a collaboration.
I suggested he could make the cut up Nerf football nosecone look like a Hershey Kiss to follow the Chocolate Rocket theme. He suggested 3D printing a more accurate shape instead, so we did. I drew it up in Fusion 360. He is learning, but that is still a little beyond him. This was last year before we bought our own printer, so a friend printed it for us, and taught us how to slice and prepare models for printing. This was our first 3D printed rocket part! We covered it in epoxy and aluminum foil. My son wanted it to come down under its own streamer separate from the booster with the streamer looking like the paper flag on a wrapped Hershey Kiss. One of my younger daughters volunteered to decorate the streamer.
We made a traditional-construction 24mm motor mount out of a Honey Nut Cheerio box and attached the Kevlar shock cord. The launch lugs are igniter packaging from an Aerotech F from last TARC season. The stand offs are scrap balsa to clear the Hershey Kiss shape of the nose cone. Even though the rocket is stubby, the tube fins provide enough drag, and the epoxy and foil on the nose cone provide enough weight, that the Chocolate Rocket string tested stable. We skipped simming this one in Rock Sim, but did use the Rocket Altitude Calculator at www.unm.edu/~tbeach/flashstuff/RocketAltitudeFixedSize.html.
The first flight was on an Estes D12-something, 5 or 7, with a Bama Recovery Systems rotafoil on the booster. It was a great flight except the streamer for the PLA Hershey Kiss nose cone was too short. Combine that with landing on blacktop and a sizeable chunk was cracked off the shoulder. By then we had our own printer and printed a replacement. The replacement flew on the second flight, also a D12-something, and with a significantly longer streamer. It was a perfect flight in every way!
I suggested he could make the cut up Nerf football nosecone look like a Hershey Kiss to follow the Chocolate Rocket theme. He suggested 3D printing a more accurate shape instead, so we did. I drew it up in Fusion 360. He is learning, but that is still a little beyond him. This was last year before we bought our own printer, so a friend printed it for us, and taught us how to slice and prepare models for printing. This was our first 3D printed rocket part! We covered it in epoxy and aluminum foil. My son wanted it to come down under its own streamer separate from the booster with the streamer looking like the paper flag on a wrapped Hershey Kiss. One of my younger daughters volunteered to decorate the streamer.
We made a traditional-construction 24mm motor mount out of a Honey Nut Cheerio box and attached the Kevlar shock cord. The launch lugs are igniter packaging from an Aerotech F from last TARC season. The stand offs are scrap balsa to clear the Hershey Kiss shape of the nose cone. Even though the rocket is stubby, the tube fins provide enough drag, and the epoxy and foil on the nose cone provide enough weight, that the Chocolate Rocket string tested stable. We skipped simming this one in Rock Sim, but did use the Rocket Altitude Calculator at www.unm.edu/~tbeach/flashstuff/RocketAltitudeFixedSize.html.
The first flight was on an Estes D12-something, 5 or 7, with a Bama Recovery Systems rotafoil on the booster. It was a great flight except the streamer for the PLA Hershey Kiss nose cone was too short. Combine that with landing on blacktop and a sizeable chunk was cracked off the shoulder. By then we had our own printer and printed a replacement. The replacement flew on the second flight, also a D12-something, and with a significantly longer streamer. It was a perfect flight in every way!
