In my 5th grade science class, we built rockets completely from scratch, rolled our own tubes, glued notecards together to make fin stock, sanded out foam nosecones and made motor clips from paper clips
Absolutely doable and a totally legitimate branch of the hobby. I did quite a bit of that when I started back up in the hobby a few years ago. The cardstock rocket modeling that is being discussed elsewhere on TRF is an example of this "totally from scratch" building.
My own TFS building reached its ultimate expression (or ultimate absurdity) when I constructed the rocket shown in the attachments. It is a ~350% upscale of the
FlisKits Midnight Express. It is 2.6" in diameter and 41" tall. The fins are solid basswood with TTW construction and it has a 38mm motor mount. With the exception of a few hardware parts, the Kevlar shock cord and the SkyAngle parachute, all of it is completely hand-made (with NO use of power tools)! The body tubes and couplers are made from several layers (5 for the tubes, 4 for the couplers) of letter-sized 110 lb. cardstock sheets. Since the sheets were so narrow, I constructed the airframe in 4 sections. I used a 2" length of Schedule 40 PVC pipe (left over from a bathroom renovation) as a mandrel. I used a cat treats container that was just the right size as a mandrel for the couplers. I built up a 1.25" diameter dowel with layers of cardstock to (eventually) make it 38mm in diameter and rolled three layers of cardstock around it to make the motor tube. I made the centering rings and bulkheads (the upper 1/4 of the rocket is a payload section) out of basswood; I drew the outlines with a compass and hand-cut the rings with a craft knife. (Yes, it hurt.) In most cases I built-up the rings from three or four layers of thin basswood, laminated with the grains at right angles to each other to impart stiffness. I did the same for the bulkheads. The nose cone was rolled from a piece of poster board which was then fiberglassed on the inside.
I had not planned to make the airframe BT-80 sized - it just worked out that way.
I chose the TDD version because it was easier to upscale (and required much less ink to print) than the original version of the Midnight Express. I upscaled the ME patterns on my computer and printed out wraps for the airframe, covers for the fins and the nose cone shroud on my ink jet printer. I printed the body tube wraps on poster board, but after gluing them on, I realized that the graphics program that I had used to upscale them had left out some of the detail (especially the red stripes). So I had to print them out again, and used photo paper that time. I also printed the fin covers on photo paper. So portions of the airframe are made from as many as
eleven layers of rolled paper.
(Four layers for the coupler, five layers for the airframe, one layer of poster board for the badly printed first wrap and one layer of heavyweight photo paper for the final good wrap.) The nose cone shoulder was made from three wraps of cardstock, using a tomato paste can as a mandrel. The entire project took me four months to complete.
All of this material means that the rocket is absurdly over-built, of course, and weight-wise, it is a pig. Total weight with recovery system is 49-52 oz., depending on what nose weight I give it. I built it at the end of 2005 and it has never flown. At the time, the smallest motor available that would safely launch it was an H (AT's G80 SU was an outside possibility), and I didn't have HP certification. (I still don't.) Since then, Aerotech has come out with the G71 (115 N peak thrust) and the G76 (way more than enough thrust), so I can buy motors now that can launch it, but I haven't attempted to do so yet.
I used Acme aluminum rail guides instead of lugs on it (the only time I have ever used anything but traditional launch lugs) and I even built my rail launcher especially for it. I didn't have a 38mm motor case when I rolled the motor tube. When I finally obtained one later on, I found that it fit my hand-made tube like a glove.
It was the most complex rocket project (and by far the largest) that I had ever attempted at that point, and it was fun to build in spite of all of its flaws. I learned a lot about construction as a result. I had previously scratch-built 24mm and 29mm minimum-diameter versions of the Midnight Express (both subsequently lost on their initial flights in early 2006). (Sadly, I have no photos of them.) Someday I may try to build this project again, but make much more intelligent use of materials so that the finished rocket doesn't resemble a boat anchor.
The second photo shows a close-up of a fin, with a couple of Micromaxx downscales of the Modnight Express in from of it.
MarkII