Oooooh.....I see the old Astron Midget in two scales, and a really cool looking BT-60 2-stager with a clear payload section!!! Can we get some details on them?
As for the original question, I have invested a lot of cash at WallyWorld buying clear plastic/vynil storage bins. They stack very nice. No way I can display the whole fleet. The big ones, 2.6" diameter and up are hanging horizontally from the rafters in the basement, everything else in the aforementioned boxes......except the current builds, which are displayed until they fly, then off they go. It is a sickness...:santa-smile:
Actually, there are three Midgets visible in both photos. If you look in between the the rocket on the stick (my Super Flea clone) on the right hand side and the Estes Wizard a little to the left of it, you will see, in order from right to left (smallest to largest), my cloned Midget Mini-Brute (the red one), my K-40 Astron Midget clone and my 168% Upscaled Midget. The Midget M-B has flown (once) and the Upscaled Midget has flown several times. I built the Upscale first because I wanted a Midget that I could fly on conventional 18mm motors. It has a Semroc ST-16 sustainer and an LT-115 booster and uses gap-staging. I flew the Mini-Brute once at an Old Motors launch on an A10-0 + 1/2A3-4 combination and nearly lost it. The K-40 clone with its Series III-style mounts has not flown yet. I had an Astron Midget as one of the rockets in my small fleet back in the late '60s. I flew it once and it was the only 2-stager that I ever flew back then. In fact, up until NARAM-51 this past August, Midget-style rockets were the only 2-stagers that I had ever flown.
The other rocket you asked about is my still-unpainted and un-decaled Apogoon, constructed from two Baby Berthas and a short section of fluorescent light tubing. The dark blue bands on it are sections of electrical tape on the shoulders of the nose block and nose cone to improve their fit with the payload section. It was one of my first builds after becoming a BAR, and I didn't know as much about rocket building as I do now. I didn't think to seal and fill the fins before assembly or to round their edges. I started to round one edge on one booster fin after I had finished the assembly and made a bit of a mess of it. The Apogoon has been sitting there on the desk for the past three years while I dither over whether to repair the fin edge and then leave all of them square, or to just start all over again and build another one.
The photos were taken in early January 2009, and there are several more rockets on the desk now. This is a bad arrangement because whenever one of them goes down, it takes several others along with it like bowling pins. So the photos don't depict my storage and display system; they depict my
lack of a system! I have plans to build a multi-tiered rack out of 1/2 inch PVC pipe. I have all of the materials that I need but I have been procrastinating about going ahead with the build while I continue to tweak the design.
MarkII
