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.