Saturday’s build session was a long one, but very productive and we are pretty much back on schedule, but it still looks like construction will continue through September. First order of business was doing a bit of fairing-in to smooth the transition between the nose cone and its attached body tube. That done, we quickly moved on to cutting fiberglass and glassing the nose cone. Reaching the top was a bit of a stretch, but we managed. That done, we began working on assembling the fins and centering rings with the booster section body tube. We initially noted a couple of mis-steps, like getting the lower centering ring rotated by 90 degrees when we glued it in place, but we corrected that by boring a couple of new holes for the all-thread rods. It didn’t take long to get the section together, but we then discovered we had routed the all-thread rods through the wrong holes in the e-bay’s lower bulkhead. So, we took the booster apart, re-aligned the all-thread rods, and re-assembled the booster. Next, we bored holes to pour the expanding foam through, and inserted the motor tubes. That’s when we figured out we must have squeezed the fins a little too tightly when epoxying them to the centering rings, and shrank the space for the central motor mount. So, we dis-assembled the booster section (again, but we were getting faster at taking it apart) and worked over the fin tabs with a couple of Dremel tools. Trimming done, we re-inserted the motor mount tubes and checked the fit, then re-assembled the booster section, again (we were getting pretty good at putting it together by now). So finally, with me perched on a ladder we began mixing and pouring expanding foam into the lower section of the booster. This went fairly smoothly, with only a couple of batches “cooking off” while still in the mixing cups, and I managed to get almost all the foam in the holes and not on the floor, outside of the rocket, or me. While this was going on, Jay made the e-bay upper bulkhead stiffeners / electronics brackets; this involved a couple of false starts, until Jay figured out the wood pieces weren’t actually the same size in –any- dimension. Jay was surprised to learn that of the three 8-foot sonotubes we started with, only a single 3” piece was left over. We didn’t want it to feel left out, so we used it to reinforce the booster tube above the fin slots.
--Ken Sparks
--Ken Sparks
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