R5a MX Hawkeye

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tjkopena

Rocketship Games
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Location
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Assembled this morning, first cut at a MicroMaxx downscale of Estes' early 90s Hawkeye, one of my favorites as a kid.

PXL_20210604_130216346.jpg

A fairly faithful half-size adaptation from the scans in JimZ's repository and this well loved ~30 year old beauty preserved in a box in Mom & Dad's garage all this time. I guess my ~13 year old self found the small forward fins just a bit too fiddly to include...

PXL_20210604_134315796.jpg

Original is a ~220mm long BT5/~14mm design. This downscale is 114m long w/ motor and a T-MM/~7mm tube. Minor changes are the nosecone not being blunted, dorsal bar continues along the rudder, faux engines moved forward very slightly and body tube sized instead of being barely-perceptibly-smaller couplers, shock cord ties to the motor block instead of being punched through the wall, and the launch lug is duplicated and the pair moved up under the pelvic fins for symmetry and greebling rather than just having one hidden behind a rudder.

Rough mockup in OpenRocket looks good. Switching the fins to balsa rather than the comparatively heavy fiberboard of the original, along with a possibly percentage-wise heavier nosecone, shifts the loaded CG forward a good bit. Not sure it would actually matter, but a priori I was a bit concerned about the MMX version being overly tail heavy since the motor's such a big chunk of the weight.

screenshot_20210604-105051.png

Kind of rainy here today but hoping for a test flight this weekend.
 
Test flights this weekend went well. They were cut short though when a flight landed within 10ft of the launch pad but the tiny rocket disappeared in the clover patch there! It took 5 or 6 people scouring a ~25x25' area for some minutes to find it, which only happened when a searcher felt it crunch underfoot! Fortunately the only damage was one fin snapped off cleanly.

It is kind of funny putting up micro-rockets on the club launch pads alongside more typical models, let alone the larger low & mid power stuff (lot of Es and Fs at our section launches). This Hawkeye especially is so small, when the RSO started counting down its first flight, people in the staging area were confused because it was hard enough to see the rocket on the rod that at first glance the pad looked empty. Another time previously, people who had not closely watched a HoneyBee takeoff were startled when it landed right in front of the staging area---it had looked so small in the sky, they thought it was way up there, not coming right at them!

PXL_20210605_172210041.jpg
One of these things is not like the others---a HoneyBee on the pads with some more typical low power models...
 
A tale of ups & downs both literal and figurative---

Daughter: "DAD, don't launch that tiny one, you're gonna lose it. Don't you remember last time, when it got stepped on??"
Me: "Pff, I know what I'm doing"

View attachment 20210822.mp4

















Me: "Good launch! Anybody got eyes on?"

Not-at-all-condescending daughter: "..."

PXL_20210822_190822415~2.jpg

Brett: "I'mma get it!"
Me: "What? No, stop, get outta that tree!"
Brett's partner: "Maybe we should just let him climb the tree. Better he does it now while we're here than sneaking back tonight by himself in the dark..."
Me: "This is, like, explicitly forbidden in the model rocket code! You're breaking the code!"
Brett: "Fine. Be that way, narc. I'll get it out this way."
/Brett liberates a traffic cone from the parking lot and hurls it at the rocket
Brett: "Almost! This'll definitely work!"
/more hurling
Bewildered daughter: "How long can he do this?"
/further indiscriminate traffic cone ballistics
Brett: "I'm alright! That didn't hurt!"
/cone gets stuck in tree
Saddened-but-accepting Daughter: "That was a nice rocket. And cone."

But then! Next morning I get this text...

2021-08-23.jpg

Victory!

Reports differ on how many tries Brett took with the washer+string before getting the rocket down...


Epilogue---
/in the still of darkest night, a traffic cone quietly falls out of a tree and lands upright, silently judging all humanity
 
Assembly is complete.
A body marking guide is included in the instructions but the body tube is laser etched with those markings so not really needed. Root chords of all balsa is also laser etched with a tic mark.
Minimum diameter, very light so break apart recovery, no streamer.
Now what to paint this with? Let's see, it's a Hawkeye, so what color should I choose? (Scratches head). Hmmmmm.
TBC
EDIT: Corrected Greyhawk to Hawkeye.
20211023_112549.jpg
 
Last edited:
Assembly is complete.
A body marking guide is included in the instructions but the body tube is laser etched with those markings so not really needed. Root chords of all balsa is also laser etched with a tic mark.
Minimum diameter, very light so break apart recovery, no streamer.
Now what to paint this with? Let's see, it's a Greyhawk, so what color should I choose? (Scratches head). Hmmmmm.
TBC
View attachment 487032
I plan to paint mine a stealthy look like the NewWay Silent Knight. I really like those rocket stands too.
 
A tale of ups & downs both literal and figurative---

Daughter: "DAD, don't launch that tiny one, you're gonna lose it. Don't you remember last time, when it got stepped on??"
Me: "Pff, I know what I'm doing"

View attachment 479464

















Me: "Good launch! Anybody got eyes on?"

Not-at-all-condescending daughter: "..."

View attachment 479462

Brett: "I'mma get it!"
Me: "What? No, stop, get outta that tree!"
Brett's partner: "Maybe we should just let him climb the tree. Better he does it now while we're here than sneaking back tonight by himself in the dark..."
Me: "This is, like, explicitly forbidden in the model rocket code! You're breaking the code!"
Brett: "Fine. Be that way, narc. I'll get it out this way."
/Brett liberates a traffic cone from the parking lot and hurls it at the rocket
Brett: "Almost! This'll definitely work!"
/more hurling
Bewildered daughter: "How long can he do this?"
/further indiscriminate traffic cone ballistics
Brett: "I'm alright! That didn't hurt!"
/cone gets stuck in tree
Saddened-but-accepting Daughter: "That was a nice rocket. And cone."

But then! Next morning I get this text...

View attachment 479463

Victory!

Reports differ on how many tries Brett took with the washer+string before getting the rocket down...


Epilogue---
/in the still of darkest night, a traffic cone quietly falls out of a tree and lands upright, silently judging all humanity
Speaking of a traffic cone,
https://www.fliskits.com/WPRESS/product/traffic-cones/
 
Chris Michielssen has a very thorough (unprompted) build of the MX Hawkeye up on his blog:

https://modelrocketbuilding.blogspot.com/search/label/RSG Hawkeye
The result looks amazing, and the whole sequence is worth reading---there are some good tips in there. I never thought about applying friction fitting tape lengthwise, but his points make sense.

RSG Hawkeye 25.JPG
 
That looks damn amazing!
Ah shucks ☺.
I can't believe how fun it was to put together. Almost a completely different skill set than what one may use for high power rocketry... Kinda like my electrical work spans from soldering SMT (thanks eggtimerrocketry.com) to pulling in and terminating 500 kcmil wire. This was my first mmx kit so I've got some skills to work on. I freehand painted the fins, NC, and launch lugs. They are a bit iffy looking up close.
Ken
 
Chris Michielssen has a very thorough (unprompted) build of the MX Hawkeye up on his blog:
https://modelrocketbuilding.blogspot.com/search/label/RSG HawkeyeThe result looks amazing, and the whole sequence is worth reading---there are some good tips in there. I never thought about applying friction fitting tape lengthwise, but his points make sense.

View attachment 491183
Here's a link that will take you directly to the build; from finished model to start:
http://modelrocketbuilding.blogspot.com/search/label/RSG Hawkeye
 
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