One of our club members was cleaning out his built rocket stash getting ready for a move.
One was an Old rough looking Mosquito that apparently was found and turned in at one of our monthly sport launches. After a few months sitting in the lost and found box it little rocket made its way to an unused rockets box.
The Poor thing looked like it might have been a Cub Scouts hand Painted open grain balsa parts in yellow and blue.
Destined for the trash can I couldn't let that happen to a Mosquito. So I gave it a new home in my basement for a year or so.
Before the February club meeting I stumbled across it again as thought it was about time I did something with it. At the meeting I sanded down as much of the old paint as possible, CA soaked the balsa parts and sanded them as smooth as what was left of them would allow. I didn't try to straighten or relocate the one clearly out of place fin as it was positioned correctly to the airstream.
At home I built a 1" long slide in pod using a piece of T2+ tube and 3 Fliskits T2+ to T5 centering rings. I also hand cut a bottom stop ring from heavy cardstock. These were white glued to the motor mount with a 3/16" piece of T2 tube as a motor stop. to the outside of the forward Rings I filed a notch 180° apart and added a 1-1/2" loop of 49strand .018" Stainless Steel beading wire and 30" of 100lb braided Kevlar shockline. At the junction of the Kevlar and Beading wire 12" of 3/4" Red Military grade Teflon (PTFE) tape has been tied, baby powdered to serve as both protective Wadding and Drag-out Streamer. The free end of the 100lb Kevlar was passed through a center hole drilled through the BNC-5V balsa nosecone the end double figure 8 knotted and CA'ed permanently in place. A small recess in the end of the bullet nose allowed CA filling and sanding completely canceling the shockline anchor hole.
Now all the little bugger needed was refinishing. Starting with 3 good coat of brown cheapy auto primer, sanded to 360grit then given a base coat of gloss white and an over spray of Krylon X-metal Conversion primer. after allowing the conversion primer to dry 30 minutes the entire model was painted with X-Metal Red giving a Red Anodized appearance. To make is sparkle a bit I used some Silver metal flake adhesive backed vinyl on both sides of 2 fins.
After all that the model tips the scale at 6.6g which should give a Lift off mass of 7.7g.
Hope to fly this one this coming weekend if the darn weather will cooperate???
If you have old mosquitos laying around and you'd really like to fly them with a good chance of getting them back for another flight, this retrofit rear ejection scheme works out really well.
One was an Old rough looking Mosquito that apparently was found and turned in at one of our monthly sport launches. After a few months sitting in the lost and found box it little rocket made its way to an unused rockets box.
The Poor thing looked like it might have been a Cub Scouts hand Painted open grain balsa parts in yellow and blue.
Destined for the trash can I couldn't let that happen to a Mosquito. So I gave it a new home in my basement for a year or so.
Before the February club meeting I stumbled across it again as thought it was about time I did something with it. At the meeting I sanded down as much of the old paint as possible, CA soaked the balsa parts and sanded them as smooth as what was left of them would allow. I didn't try to straighten or relocate the one clearly out of place fin as it was positioned correctly to the airstream.
At home I built a 1" long slide in pod using a piece of T2+ tube and 3 Fliskits T2+ to T5 centering rings. I also hand cut a bottom stop ring from heavy cardstock. These were white glued to the motor mount with a 3/16" piece of T2 tube as a motor stop. to the outside of the forward Rings I filed a notch 180° apart and added a 1-1/2" loop of 49strand .018" Stainless Steel beading wire and 30" of 100lb braided Kevlar shockline. At the junction of the Kevlar and Beading wire 12" of 3/4" Red Military grade Teflon (PTFE) tape has been tied, baby powdered to serve as both protective Wadding and Drag-out Streamer. The free end of the 100lb Kevlar was passed through a center hole drilled through the BNC-5V balsa nosecone the end double figure 8 knotted and CA'ed permanently in place. A small recess in the end of the bullet nose allowed CA filling and sanding completely canceling the shockline anchor hole.
Now all the little bugger needed was refinishing. Starting with 3 good coat of brown cheapy auto primer, sanded to 360grit then given a base coat of gloss white and an over spray of Krylon X-metal Conversion primer. after allowing the conversion primer to dry 30 minutes the entire model was painted with X-Metal Red giving a Red Anodized appearance. To make is sparkle a bit I used some Silver metal flake adhesive backed vinyl on both sides of 2 fins.
After all that the model tips the scale at 6.6g which should give a Lift off mass of 7.7g.
Hope to fly this one this coming weekend if the darn weather will cooperate???
If you have old mosquitos laying around and you'd really like to fly them with a good chance of getting them back for another flight, this retrofit rear ejection scheme works out really well.
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