Thread: Vashon Baron?
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Old 04-28-2021, 07:02 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Comrades:

Don's instructions are great and they do contain the dimensions of the fuselage for both Baron and Gnat. Mine will have spruce fuses and I've dug out the Monokote and iron. The Monokote worked great on the X-13 I already built so I'm looking forward to using it on these two.

The Astro-Gnat is a V-tail with a ten inch wingspan and what appears to be a 2:1 taper, swept leading edge/straight trailing edge planform.

The Baron is a twin tail with a twelve inch wingspan and an apparent 2:1 double-taper planform. I'm not sure about the 2:1 as it might be less. It also has built-in negative stab incidence on a double taper stab.

Here's the ninfinger link to the Estes 1973 catalog: http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/ca...73/73est46.html

So, if someone's got one or both in a box, we need wing and stab dimensions and the dihedral jig dimensions and we've got what we need to recreate these. If I were guessing, I'd bet the wings were 3/32 balsa with a 3" center chord on Baron and 2.5" on Astro-Gnat. Stabs were 1/16" balsa
The boosters of all of these Cold Propellant boost-gliders (the X-13 [is its glider identical, or nearly so, to the Estes Firefly B/G?], Gnat, and Baron) can be reproduced quite accurately using the 0.976" O.D. BT-50 tubing (filled, sanded, and painted to match the original 1" O.D. boosters' motor, parachute tube, and nose cone colors) and the Alpha III plastic nose cone, whose shape is similar to that of the original models (it's not an exact shape match, but good enough for [probably] most folks). Besides that, shorter-delay 18 mm black powder motors (such as the 1/2A6-2, B4-2, B6-2, C6-3 [and maybe the A3-2T and/or A10-3T, with an adapter mount--or the red plastic split 13 mm/18 mm motor adapter sleeve]) would probably work well. Using appropriate total impulse & delay 13 mm motors would also permit simulated Cold Propellant motor nozzle skirts (made of card stock, say, perhaps flame-proofed with sodium silicate ["water glass," as Jetex/Jet-X/Rapier modelers used/use on their model planes' rolled paper--or rolled thin sheet balsa--jet exhaust ducts]) to be used on these "near-clone" B/G boosters.
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