Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Mercury Redstone Family Portrait


Here's all three of my Mercury Redstones,

From left to right:
1. The carded Redstone just built on this blog.
2. Dr. Zooch Freedom 7 (BT-50 based mainframe)
3. Dr. Zooch Mercury Redstone (BT-60 based mainframe)

The large Zooch Redstone is a close as you'll get to the original Estes K-41 kit.
It's the same height and diameter.
The printed capsule detail is better in the Zooch kit.
In the Zooch version, there is less detail in the fins, which was fine with me. The Estes kit had five formed pieces in each fin!

If you want to see how scale kits used to be made, check out the Estes Redstone kit at JimZ's:
http://www.spacemodeling.org/JimZ/k-41.htm

2 comments:

  1. How very cool! The paper Redstone you build on the cruise is on my winter rocket building list. What paper stock did you use for the construction?

    Thanks for blogging your build. It'll probably be my first card/paper rocket for a 13mm engine, and your notes on the engine mount should be a real help!

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  2. Hi Ray,
    Thanks for the comments!
    I used 110 lb. cardstock for the Mercury Redstone.
    That Redstone version is a great first time carded rocket build. It's not too time consuming and the tower is a tri-fold!
    Good luck with it, just don't fly it with too long a delay like I did. I have to build another capsule and tower for this weekend's launch.

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