While I'm still struggling with the paint scheme on my Gray Hawk, I decided to put that project aside for a little while and restore something completely different.
Digging into the box of neglected unloved and forgotten rockets, I pulled out a NewWay Rockets CUBIX. This came to me from a collection that I purchased from a school teacher that ran a rocket program at his school. When he left, the rocket program closed and he took the left over rockets with him. As you can imaging the quality of the builds are all over the place from pretty good to down right dangerous. This one falls somewhere in the middle.
Looking at the rocket I can see that it has not been flown. There are no powder marks inside the tube and it doesn't smell flown.
Overall the rocket isn't bad. There is crease in the tube where it looks like something was set on top of it. I'm not sure if NewWay sells couplers so I'll need to address this myself. Here is what we're starting with.
This first photo isn't bad. The crease in the tube isn't really visible. What we can see is that none of the wood was sealed or finished and the little bit of glue used is just barely holding the rocket together.
This next shot, I removed the recovery system. All of there stock parts are there and in pretty good shape. I'm thinking I will reuse most of them including the rather colorful parachute. Here the crease in the tube is obvious.
Here we have a couple of pics of the fins / box and motor mount. You can see that someone got carried away with glue on the mount so I won't be removing that from the rocket anytime soon. The motor clip will be removed simply because it prevents the rocket from standing on it's own.
And finally, a pic looking down into the fin can.
Overall the parts look good and should make for a decent restoration project.
Now comes the fun part. Disassembly and checking all the parts. I knew early on that I needed to fix the crease so the tube was cut in half just below the crease line.
Next was removing the box fins. The outside of the box came loose easily. Literally put just a little pressure and the whole thing collapsed. The inner fins were glued in pretty well so those were cut off and the slots cleaned up. I made replacements from scrap Balsa I had laying around. All of these will be papered and sealed with thin epoxy so no worries.
That is as far as I got last night. Will be doing some more tonight after work.
Digging into the box of neglected unloved and forgotten rockets, I pulled out a NewWay Rockets CUBIX. This came to me from a collection that I purchased from a school teacher that ran a rocket program at his school. When he left, the rocket program closed and he took the left over rockets with him. As you can imaging the quality of the builds are all over the place from pretty good to down right dangerous. This one falls somewhere in the middle.
Looking at the rocket I can see that it has not been flown. There are no powder marks inside the tube and it doesn't smell flown.
Overall the rocket isn't bad. There is crease in the tube where it looks like something was set on top of it. I'm not sure if NewWay sells couplers so I'll need to address this myself. Here is what we're starting with.
This first photo isn't bad. The crease in the tube isn't really visible. What we can see is that none of the wood was sealed or finished and the little bit of glue used is just barely holding the rocket together.
This next shot, I removed the recovery system. All of there stock parts are there and in pretty good shape. I'm thinking I will reuse most of them including the rather colorful parachute. Here the crease in the tube is obvious.
Here we have a couple of pics of the fins / box and motor mount. You can see that someone got carried away with glue on the mount so I won't be removing that from the rocket anytime soon. The motor clip will be removed simply because it prevents the rocket from standing on it's own.
And finally, a pic looking down into the fin can.
Overall the parts look good and should make for a decent restoration project.
Now comes the fun part. Disassembly and checking all the parts. I knew early on that I needed to fix the crease so the tube was cut in half just below the crease line.
Next was removing the box fins. The outside of the box came loose easily. Literally put just a little pressure and the whole thing collapsed. The inner fins were glued in pretty well so those were cut off and the slots cleaned up. I made replacements from scrap Balsa I had laying around. All of these will be papered and sealed with thin epoxy so no worries.
That is as far as I got last night. Will be doing some more tonight after work.
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