04 Bringing It Together
The nose cone shipment arrived yesterday. I now have the items I need (with a few exceptions).
Cool stuff. First thing I did was trim the excess plastic with a hobby knife and scrub the entire nose cone with Dawn dish detergent. This seems a little silly, but the release agent that coats the injection mold stays on the plastic. And as you might imagine, the same stuff that keeps the plastic from sticking to the mold will also keep the paint from sticking to the nose cone.
At this point, I wanted to see how big this puppy is going to be.
Wow. Pretty much the largest rocket I’ve ever constructed.
Enough day dreaming, I need to get moving on some of the detail work. I cut some more bamboo spacers and worked on the length until the top baffle plate was completely flush with the top of the coupler tube. I then superglued them into place.
You will also notice that I wicked some thin superglue around the top of the coupler tube. This makes the end of the tube a little easier to sand. Which I had to do a little later to get the lower airframe to slide down over the fin can.
Here’s where I ran into the first issue. The RedArrow bulkheads are quite a bit different from the ones I got from LOC several years ago. They are 1/4″ plywood…and the center hole is HUGE! Way bigger than the little screweye I had planned to use. So, I’m going to have to go get an eye that is a bolt, with two flat washers. This will end up being better–and I actually like that this plate is thicker.
The other strange thing is that it isn’t quite big enough in circumference. I would prefer it to be a tighter fit. This is a little unexpected–I was used to the way the LOC plates fit into the tubes. I think it will be fine. I have a plan 
Anyway, on to the airframe. After spending a few minutes deciding how far down to make the cut, I took the airframe tube out to the miter saw. And the results you can see below.
Groovy. Now, to mark those fin slots. I didn’t know it was going to be so easy. Because of the notch in the fins, the tube actually centered itself. One lesson learned, however, is that the fin alignment is never going to be perfectly regular, so make a mark to correlate the fin to the position on the airframe. I had a hard time figuring out which slot went with which fin later.
But, the miter saw came through for me again. The blade width is almost perfect for the 1/8″ plywood. I just had to clean up the top of the slots with a hobby knife.
Time to test fit all this stuff together…exciting stuff…after I found the right slot…and sanding the edges of the baffle assembly…and well…you get the picture
It was here that I found my second issue. The lower CR is ALSO 1/4″. I need to check my invoice, I suppose that I ordered them that way. Anyway, it doesn’t match the notches in the fins. I suppose I will have to fix this with my jigsaw so that it all flushes out.
Oh well, I’ll save that for later. Here’s a final picture of the Sirius in it’s first standup.
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