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WAEC Rockets Space Racer SAM-66 Sunbird II Pi Sprint Leviathan Space Racer II Arcturus Mk. 1 Roswell or Bust! Brinley Short March Discovery XW-1 Apollo-LES Sprint II Lone Star Mercury-Redstone Shenzhou Saturn 1B Saturn V Gemini-Titan II Juno I Chrysler Building More Information |
 byzantine
escape tower structure. But then, I got the idea of converting a
1/96 paper model into a flying rocket. Admittedly, I stole the idea from a man named Dennis Brooks, who used the free model from Delta 7 studios to do the same thing. He also made one of the capsule kits to fly on its own, which is something I haven't done yet. Converting the paper model into a flight capable rocket was relatively simple. It was made easier by the fact that a properly-scaled 1/96 Redstone body is almost the exact same size as a BT-20 body tube. I could simply roll the paper body around the BT-20, easily reinforcing it. For added security, I soaked it in cyanoacrylate. The spacecraft was easy to build, and needed no additional help beyond CA. For the fins, I glued the paper onto a sheet of styrene plastic. Then, I glued everything together, added a streamer, engine mount, and launch lug. With that, I had a perfectly-crafted Mercury-Redstone model, with a mere fraction of the effort had I tried to build it with ordinary model rocket parts. I have only flown it twice, once on December 22, 2002. I launched it on a mini engine (I don't even remember which), and it flew fairly well. The boost was stable, and the descent was slow. I discovered two minor problems when it landed, though. The escape tower broke off (I'll need to reinforce that), and a bit of the body was discolored at the seperation point (I don't know what to do with that, exactly). The second flight was on March 2, 2003 (the 70th anniversary of the release of King Kong!). This was on an A10-3T engine, which was too heavy for a stable flight. It flipped about on boost, but recovered and experienced only minor damage on landing. Of three paper model rockets I built from my own design, this was the first and most successful. Specifications
Subject: Mercury-Redstone 4,
Spacecraft #11 (Liberty Bell 7), July 21, 1961Scale: 1/96 Length: 27 cm Body Tube: BT-20 Engine Mount: 13 mm Nose Shape: Conical (sort of) Recovery: Streamer Fin Shape: Trapezoid Number of Flights: 2 Mercury-Redstone
Plans
image:
An overall shot of the rocket.Mercury Redstone Photographs image: Detail of the spacecraft. Note the fingerprint-shaped blob of glue on the base of the spacecraft; I've found that sort of thing is remarkably hard to avoid. image: Detail of the fins. I think I did a relatively good job with this part of the model. |
| All materials
herein copyright 2002-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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