Winter 2022 Builds

Like many, Ive always painted outside. Never a day indoors.
Back where I used to live, I used to paint (within looking distance, but not very near) to a Playground, so the neighborhood kids used to always come up to me when I finished spraying. They always used to say "Oh your the kid that builds rockets, right?". Fun times.

After moving here, I spray in a secluded alleyway, away from the doors, backyards, and plants, we nicknamed it, "Area 51".

The Northeastern students paint outside near a large building on campus that blocks the wind. John P's suggestion of painting at my desk at work sounds interesting except that I came up with a big list of things that can possibly go wrong.

Build Update:

Doorknob flew at the Winter Follies.  Although it looked like a great flight, the top of the body tube zippered a bit.  I'm using piston ejection and I had the piston extending out over 4 feet from the end of the tube.  I'll cut the kevlar cord and then add an extra 3 or 4 feet more.  I'll fix and seal the tube and add an extra silver stripe flush with the top of the tube.

Nike Hercules upper stage was going to fly, but I forgot to add a ton of weight to the nose, and remembered I forgot before shooting it off.  Flying the full model is a lot more stable then flying just the upper stage.  I made it so I could get to the tip of the nose to add weight for upper stage flights and remove for full model flights.

The two 3-Stage birds are waiting for primer and paint (and warmer weather).  All the fins are on: 2 rockets X 3 stages = 24 Fins.  That's 96 tapered edges!  Good thing they are small to tiny.

Fins just got epoxied to my Patriot.  May be able to primer and paint when I do the 3-stage rockets.

Striker/Hellfire hasn't been touched yet.

Could you please post some photos of how you add/remove weight to the NC of the Nike Hercules in the Winter Build Gallery? Sounds interesting. Even though I saw the piston system on your Doorknob kit, I think other people would be interested in seeing photos of that too.

Well one of the reasons I forgot to add weight to the Nike Herc nose cone was I hadn't fully decided how to actually do it.  On the Boyce kit, there is a solid 3D printed "shoulder" that gets glued into the nose cone.  I turned it into a "tube" and reinforced it and epoxied a kevlar cord into it for attachment.  I am going to need at least 2 grams of weight and I do have that in clay.  I was going to put the clay in a sandwich bag and press that into the nose cone.  I was then going to shove enough paper up inside the nose cone, between the clay and shoulder tube, to hold the clay in place.

As for the piston, attached is a picture.  It's pretty easy to do.  The piston is basically a "Coupler Tube" with a bulkhead in it.  The "Inner Side" attaches to the rocket via kavlar cord. The "Outer Side" of the piston attaches to the recovery system via shock cord. 

 I had somewhat of a "spur of the moment" idea a couple weeks back to make another 3D printed figurine rocket, so Boba Fett was born. Someone on Facebook suggested perhaps a drag race between him and Mando could be in the future. The issue here is availability of 1010 rails. I know the club typically only has one (and I personally only have one for local field launching.) Are there other concerns for having more than one rail available or purely a cost issue?