EXPjawa
Well-Known Member
OK, here's the story. I suppose anyone that's paid attention would know that I've got an affinity for rockets that look like aircraft, so this one is right up my alley. Several weeks ago, my brother-in-law told me about a rocket that someone at LUNAR launch gave my nephew. He said it was a "Firecat", and was pretty old, but not finished. But he hadn't found any information about it. I remembered a Firecat from the Estes catalogs in the early '80s, so I assumed that what he meant. He said it had a bulged nose cone, and the Firecat I knew used the same double conical cone as the Harpoon, so I thought I with him so far. But then he described wings with fins on the ends and engine-looking tube on the belly. No, that's definitely not what was in the catalog.
Fast forward a bit, and with a bit of digging, I found out about the EAC Firecat - a model only sold to members of the Estes Aerospace Club. I'd thought that the only rocket exclusive to the EAC members was the Viper, but apparently this was a real limited production kit advertised in the newsletter. But I did locate the plans/instructions on one of the sites (don't recall which at the moment). This thing is sort of a production kitbash, with fins and nose from the then-current BT50 HoJo and decals from the Bandit. Throw in a piece of BT48 tube - which I'd not heard of before, even Semroc didn't have it - and cut a few of the scraps of balsa up from the fin sheet, and there you have it. And I had to have one.
There was enough info on the instructions to clone without too much difficulty. The -50BD cone is newly available again from Semroc. The decals are printed by Excelsior already. The only hang up was the pesky BT48 tube - a tube only a little smaller than normal BT50. So, I substituted a piece of BT50 coupler, which is roughly .020" bigger in diameter than BT48. Under the circumstances, I'm good with that. The only other deviation I made was use of basswood instead of balsa; the complicated fins-on-fins design isn't something I really felt 3/32" balsa was up to. I modeled it in Rocksim once I had the details sorted out to make sure that the heavier wood would still balance OK. It is definitely more tail-heavy, but with a 1/4" dowel in the nose cone, its acceptable. Anyway, I put it all together last night. Primer/filling/painting is yet to be done.
Fast forward a bit, and with a bit of digging, I found out about the EAC Firecat - a model only sold to members of the Estes Aerospace Club. I'd thought that the only rocket exclusive to the EAC members was the Viper, but apparently this was a real limited production kit advertised in the newsletter. But I did locate the plans/instructions on one of the sites (don't recall which at the moment). This thing is sort of a production kitbash, with fins and nose from the then-current BT50 HoJo and decals from the Bandit. Throw in a piece of BT48 tube - which I'd not heard of before, even Semroc didn't have it - and cut a few of the scraps of balsa up from the fin sheet, and there you have it. And I had to have one.
There was enough info on the instructions to clone without too much difficulty. The -50BD cone is newly available again from Semroc. The decals are printed by Excelsior already. The only hang up was the pesky BT48 tube - a tube only a little smaller than normal BT50. So, I substituted a piece of BT50 coupler, which is roughly .020" bigger in diameter than BT48. Under the circumstances, I'm good with that. The only other deviation I made was use of basswood instead of balsa; the complicated fins-on-fins design isn't something I really felt 3/32" balsa was up to. I modeled it in Rocksim once I had the details sorted out to make sure that the heavier wood would still balance OK. It is definitely more tail-heavy, but with a 1/4" dowel in the nose cone, its acceptable. Anyway, I put it all together last night. Primer/filling/painting is yet to be done.
