My latest - Bai Fang

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stealth6

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Not quite ready to fly, but ready enough to take a few pics and share them with y'all - Bai Fang.

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Yes, the airframe is bamboo.
Yes, those fins are lashed with jute twine*.
No, those are not carbon fibre or fibreglass fins - they're "burlap fibre"! (three layers of good old burlap set with cheapo polyester resin)

Inside is a 38mm phenolic motor mount and kevlar shock cord. Nose cone? - balsa of course! I still need to install a motor retainer and stuff a chute into it, but other than that it's ready for launch. It's quite heavy, but my sims tell me I should get about 900' out of a G76. Of course I could shove up to a J in there, but methinks it would be wise to stick with "low & slow" for this rocket. I will of course test it alone in the desert before attempting a launch near any people. Will post updates.

The name is a white guy's bastardization of "Bang Fai" which some of you might know are bamboo rockets from a REALLY crazy festival in Thailand. Very different than this (more like bottle rockets....BIG bottle rockets), and I'm sure my name means something totally different and probably stupid or obscene in Thai, but I just liked the sound of it.

s6

(*= the lashing is actually ornamental - these fins are in fact TTW and fully secured with epoxy)

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100% super cool. I wish my creativity was such that I built things like that. I think some of my rockets are cool, but that one has a very artistic/functional thing going.

Sandy.
 
Very nice!
First word that came to me when I looked at the pics..

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Oh man! I had totally planned on that last summer but must have lost my 'roundtuit'. Looks awesome. Can't wait to see how it flies! I was thinking of an "all natural" where NC was made of molded raw hide, fins laminated burlap. Great job! (just noticed you did the laminated burlap)
 
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Love it! I'm assuming the jute is ornamental - but a very nice touch. I couldn't tell in the photo how it was attached.
Also - I work with bamboo a lot as decorations and have trouble with it splitting. Did you do something something special with this to prevent that?
 
Love it! I'm assuming the jute is ornamental - but a very nice touch. I couldn't tell in the photo how it was attached.
Also - I work with bamboo a lot as decorations and have trouble with it splitting. Did you do something something special with this to prevent that?

"do something special"? Ummm...yeah - I basically just split and ruined about eight pieces before I finally had one that happened to stayed together. You aren't kidding when you say "trouble with splitting"!

First off, (like you I imagine, being in Carson City), I found that living in the desert southwest is most decidedly NOT the place for bamboo. It's REALLY hard to dry it correctly with no splitting. I tried a number of techniques - all of which pretty much failed. In the end I think I simply got lucky with the final piece. At first I found it nearly impossible to buy in small quantities - there were some good price/deals to be had on the internet, but nearly all of them required me to buy something on the order of ten 8' pieces, or pay outrageous shipping for just one or two. Eventurally I found one place that sold me eight 4' pieces for a good price - which turned out to be necessary as almost all of them split at one point or the other. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the rocket will survive at least a couple of flights before it self-destructs.

And yes, the jute is basically ornamental.

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I've been wanting to build this one for a long time now. It's purely about fun for me - and humor (I keep laughing every time I pick this up). It will definately be fun to fly.

s6
 
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Now that's outside the box great job and when your done with it it will make a nice end table lamp:D
 
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