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At springfest 2006 Jessica asked me if she could
get a new rocket. I helped steer her towards one of the BSD kits that
Scott Ulrey had spent all night putting together. She decided on the
3" version of the Diablo.
1st thing that needed to be done was to mark
exactly where the cuts for the fins needed to go.
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She decided that she'd rather have me cut the slots
for the fins because she didn't want to risk messing up the tube. I took
out the hobby knife with a nice new #11 blade and started making the cuts.
I used a small piece of aluminum angle to make sure the initial cuts where
nice and straight. It only took a few passes with the nice sharp blade to
cut through the cardboard tube. |
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The slots needed to be a hair wider and needed to be cleaned up a little
bit so I used my Dremel with a carbide grinding bit to open them up and
clean them out. |
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Jessica wasn't going to let me do everything, this is her first "involved"
build after all. She's dry fitting the 29mm motor mount here. |
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Sanding was slow going trying to get the centering rings to fit into the
body tube without being way too tight so I took it outside and hit it with
the Mouse for a few seconds. This worked out great and the centering rings
fit perfectly in no time. |
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Jess used 5 minute epoxy to bond the upper centering ring to the motor
mount. She left the lower ring loose so we could get it back out of the
rocket to have access to the fins inside. |
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Dry fit of the motor mount and fins in the rocket. As you can see a 29mm
motor mount in a 3" tube leaves allot of room to work inside the rocket. |
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To get the whole upper ring epoxied in sometimes it's just easier to mix
up enough 30 minute epoxy that you can just dump enough in an move it around
until the entire ring is covered. |
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Jess then put epoxy fillets on the fins. |
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Internal fillets where then done, The fins are bonded to the inside and
outside of the body, as well as the motor mount. The nylon strap that the
shock cord attaches to is also bonded to the inside wall of the body. Should
make for a nice strong tail end of the rocket. The epoxy on the centering
ring looks messed up in the pic, but it's the way the flash hit it, belive
me, after seeing the pic I checked it out and it was fine. |
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The bottom ring is epoxied in last, for some reason (mostly laziness)
I only installed one motor retainer, should work out just fine but would've
been better with both. |
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This rocket looks great even in just primer, at this point I'm just letting
the primer dry long enough to make it easier to work with when I go to sand
it and apply the color coat. |
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She wanted her Diablo purple with white fins. I used some Kandy Purple
Pearl over a white base coat, masking off the fins so they'd just have
the white.
There where a few minor changes that we made when building this kit.
We threw the the elastic shock cord out in favor of tubular nylon. I believe
that newer kits now come with TN as standard as elastic belongs in your
underwear and not in your rocket. We also went with some rail buttons
that I got from railbuttons.com, I didn't really like the buttons that
it came with because they're made up of too many pieces. I believe that
this has been changed as well. |
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Posing with her Diablo at Jean Lake (dry) before her maiden voyage. |
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Walking her Diablo out to the pad. |
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Hooked up and (I thought) ready to go, unfortunately we where attempting
to use an AeroTech copperhead igniter, witch all but crapped out, twice.
I finally got an igniter from Just Rockets and we where set to go. |
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5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and off she goes...
The flight was nice and straight on the little AeroTech G64-10W that
we launched on. This is unfortunately the only motor this Diablo is likely
to ever fly on considering that Jessica is only 13. The only way it's
going on anything bigger is if I personally take over and put it up on
a H. After liftoff I stopped taking pics so I could enjoy the flight,
it was great until right after apogee. The ejection charge went off and
out came the parachute, all nice and tangled up in the shock cord. The
rocket came in hard right behind the flight line. |
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Scott, the owner of Just Rockets and BSD Rocketry inspecting the damage
with us. As you can tell Jess is pretty pissed about her new Diablo falling
from the sky on her first flight. This prompted her to convince me that
she needed another new rocket a few hours later. She picked up a LOC Aurora,
I'll have a page for that build as soon as she actually decides that she
wants to build it and starts bugging me about it. |
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Only problem with getting a new rocket is there isn't exactly a whole
lot of damage to this little devil. This thing is nice and tough. You can
see that some of the paint chipped off the nose cone. |
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The bottom of the body took a little damage, and you can see how far the
fin stuck into the playa. |
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Another view of the extremely minor damage to this thing. In all actuality
there is nothing seriously wrong with the Diablo after the crash other than
the cosmetic damage. I'm sure we'll fly it again soon. |
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Another day, another G64-10. For some reason I couldn't seem to get the
camera to focus right early on in the day, and this was the 1st launch of
the day. |
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Clearing the pad. |
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The Diablo weather cocked a little, but it wasn't bad and the rocket whent
basically straight up. |
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This time the chute deployed perfectly, and there was absolutly zero damage
to the rocket this time around. I personally can't wait to see this thing
fly again and again |
