The chosen one has returned

Picked up the rocket from the Ultimate Paint Shop today. All I can say is: WOW!



The good news is they did a FANTASTIC job! Look at the paint on those fillets – all of my other rockets will look horrible in comparison. Oh well
The bad news is I have two days left to finish the rocket.
Things left to do:
a little rewiring on the AV-Bay. I found an intermittent short on one of the ematch wires. Better safe then sorry.
Need to weight all the parts and recompute the CD/CG. Determine if I need nose weight, then epoxy in the allthread into the nosecone. Also need to foam the nosecone, build some electronics compartments and install the forward bulkhead
I re-fit the AV bay into the upper sustainer, and retest the main parachute deployment. now that everything has been painted. I decided on redundant BP blastcaps for both the drogue and main deployment charges. Better safe then sorry, and I can always remove them later.
drill air holes, sheering pin holes, altimeter arming holes,altimeter breathing holes, and 1515 rail button mounting holes.

Checklist and a sponsorship!

Sorry for the lack of updates. work and travel have taken over a bit.

T-2 weeks and counting until lift-off!

I’ve added a page for my pre-flight checklist. you can see it here: http://mylevel3.wordpress.com/pre-flight-checklist/ this is a work in progress, so let me know if you think I’m missing anything obvious.

My rocket now has a few sponsors! I took my rocket into a local automotive paint dealer, The Ultimate Paint Shop in Lake Bluff to get an early start on the paint job(weather has been bad in the Chicago area, they have an indoor paint booth). By the time I left their facility, I had two firm sponsors, with the possibility of adding more.

I checked with my TAP sponsors to make sure it would be ok to have ‘professionals’ finish the exterior – they were all for it. Feels a bit strange – I have no idea what the rocket is going to look like when they are done. I picked out the primary colors, but told them they could add their logo’s and names as necessary for the sponsorships. The one thing I can be sure of is the paint job will certainly look a lot better than if I did it.

In the meantime, I’ve been finishing up the programming on the Altimeters and prepping the GPS & trackers. I decided to add a terminal block for my raven to simply the connection process since it has a common ground. I also learned something new about my Marsa4. I’ve been running low on my ematch supply (Wildman ejection charge lighters), so I ordered a few Quest Q2G2 long’s to use as ematches. I use the Q2’s a lot for lpr rockets as they are very easy to set up, and are extremely reliable. The Q2’s require a very small current to go off. Turns out the Marsa4 puts out enough milliamps during it’s continuity check to ignite the Q2’s. Reinforces the “ground test, ground test, ground test” adage. I will use the Wildman ejection lighters for the marsa4, and the Q2G2’s for the raven.

Rocket Primed

I’ve gone through several more sanding / priming steps. Also managed to fit the custom nosecone to the sustainer. It’s starting to look like a real rocket! Unfortunately, it’s still cold in the Chicago area, so I’ve been forced to prime outside, then quickly bring everything back into the garage. My wife’s been pretty good about the horrible paint smell, but this won’t last long. Hopefully the weather will start to cooperate soon to get some real work done. My giant piece of allthread also showed up from Mcmaster-Carr for the nosecone. I’m going to reweigh everything and recalculate the Cp/Cd to determine how much nosecone weight I should use to work on that over the weekend.

Electronics (step 1)

I’ve been slowly getting back to work. This weekend I spent some time to mount the electronics into the tri-AVbay.

As you can see from the progression below, there isn’t too much to mounting the electronics. I positioned the Altimeter (in this case, a Marsa4), put mounting marks through the screw holes, drilled and tapped the mounting holes, then mounted the altimeter using #4 machine screws and plastic spacers. On the opposite side of the bay, I mounted a 9 volt battery holder, and ran the wires through the bolt cut out.

 

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I then drilled holes through the top and bottom of the AVBay,and ran ignition wires from the altimeter through each hole.

Once I had the ignition wires through the hole, I mounted a 4-way screw terminal through the same hole, and secured the ignition wires into one side of the screw terminal. This will allow me to mount the e-matches to the screw terminal instead of threading them through the av-bay, and having to re-seal the AV-bay after each launch. This is a method I have been successful with in the past, although I am well aware these screw terminals will be subjected to the black powder residue , and will likely have to be replaced over time.

                     

I then went through the same process with the Raven. First, it is striking how small the raven is, when you look at it in this big AV bay. The raven is more complex to install since it uses a common + wiring scheme. While the Marsa4 had discrete connectors for everything (a + and -  for each e-match, the battery, and the power switch), the Raven only has 4 terminals and a battery + for everything. This means the power switch has to be inline, and each e-match has to be connected to the same + battery post. Not a big deal, and great if you are putting this in a minimum diameter rocket. With the amount of space in my AV bays, it’s kind of unnecessary. That said, this is my most

The third AV Bay will house a Communication Specialist tracker, and an Altus-Metrum. I haven’t decided on where to mount the power connectors yet. I will probably wait until the very end to determine their optimum placement.

Pre-Flight Data Capture Form

I brought the booster section and AV-Bay up to bong this weekend to show my latest progress, and one of my TAP sponsors asked to see my pre-data capture form. Of course, I didn’t have it, so I’m posting it here to make it easily accessible the next time he asks

 

 

Sand, Prime, Repeat

     The good news is the new pads for my sander came in (picture on left). The bad news is that means I have a LOT of sanding to do. I took advantage of the weather last week to start the lengthy process of sanding, filling, priming, and sanding again to get a nice smooth finish on the rocket. The glassing of the wings turned out a bit messy because of the limited space (about 1.5”) between the trailing edge of the wings, and the leading edge of the fins. I couldn’t find a way to properly keep enough weight on the curing fiberglass to provide the same clean surface I ended up with on the wing tops and fin can. Worse, I can’t really fit an electrical sander in that area, so I’ve had to create all sorts of sanding devices to get into that area. You can see what looks like multiple colors on the wings and fins in the picture on the left. This is indicates in some areas I have sanded through the top layer of fiberglass into the Kevlar. That’s not necessarily a good thing,

so I’m now using a different technique to smooth out rough areas, and even out all of the surfaces. I cleaned the surfaces, and sprayed a first coat of primer. The primer will even out many of the smaller pinholes and rough areas, but more importantly, it will allow me to see very quickly when I’ve sanded through into the fiberglass with the big difference in color. My first pass turned out smoother than I had anticipated, but up close, it still looks like Mickey Rourke’s face – that’s not a good thing. I have three major areas left on the rocket:
1) electrical
  I still need to install the switches, terminal blocks altimeters, GPS devices, and RF trackers  into the rocket and AV-BAY.

2) Nosecone
     The Nosecone shoulder still doesn’t fit  into the upper sustainer. That means more sanding, or, worst case, cutting the shoulder, and replacing it with a new home-made shoulder from a coupler. I also may need to add weight to the nosecone, and probably foam it. I’ll also need to make bay’s for tracking equipment, install all-thread, a bulkhead, and weight bearing anchor.
3) Sanding & Painting
     My plan is to put a really nice airbrushed paintjob on the rocket. Black base with winding flames is my current plan.  This will require a very smooth surface, which means lots of priming and sanding. I’m going to wait until the weather turns a little nicer so I can do this outside, and avoid ruining all of the surfaces and cars in nice garage. My wife hasn’t said anything yet about all of the dust, and I don’t want to push my luck.
    II will probably be taking a break for a bit on the construction side. Work travel is picking up a lot, three of my four daughters need pinewood derby cars made by mid march, and I still haven’t finished those crayon rockets I gave my kids for Christmas. With that said, I’ do plan to finish #1, #2 by next month so I can get a ‘practice’ launch in before the big event in April. Hopefully my leg will have recovered enough for some rocket hunting

It’s alive!

     The weather was beautiful yesterday in the Chicago area – a Balmy 52 degrees! I moved the rocket to the garage, but couldn’t resist putting it together for the first time. I still have a fit problem between the nosecone and sustainer, but finally looks like a rocket. It’s supposed to be another nice day today, so I may try to get a few coats of primer on the booster section to see how much sanding and filling work I’ll really need to do – the fin and wing glassing came out much smoother than my usual work.