06-02-2018, 08:19 AM
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Master Modeler
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GuyNoir
I've also heard that many of the catalog and trade show display models are not built with balsawood fins, but substitute plexiglass instead. Much easier to get a good finish on THAT!
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I wouldn't mind if such fins--plexiglass and waferglass fins are not uncommon on competition rockets--were offered in "regular" kits. (I once had--but never got around to building--one or two of the "pre-Tim Milligan era" [it was the Ed LaCroix era; he started the company] Apogee Components streamer duration rocket kits [see: http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/ca...4apogeecat.html ], which had phenolic body tubes and thin waferglass fins, which were very thin and smooth.) Also:
When I visited the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre in England for a couple of weeks in August of 2010, Stuart Lodge, a long-time British competition spacemodeler and contest judge, came to visit me there one day. He brought along a packing case full of models that he has flown in contests all over the world (they appear in several of his books). They include a scale Vertikal vehicle (whose spherical nose/separable instrument capsule [on the actual vehicle] is depicted by a glass sphere bottle [for perfume or cologne, if memory serves]) and an MMI Aerobee-Hi, whose fins appear to be made of waferglass or plexiglass (they're very light, thin, and stiff, yet very smoothly-finished).
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