Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Wolverine Rocketry Phoenix AIM-54A Finished!

Take a look at the picture to the right -
Can you see what's wrong?

When applying the decals, the measurements on the decal placement sheet weren't adding up!

I checked the old Estes catalogs. This BT-80 rocket should be 30" tall.
My model was 33 3/4" tall!

I called the folks at Wolverine and we figured it out.
Before I drew the instructions for the kit, I was sent all the parts to make the model.
The longer BT-80 lower tube was 18" long. It should have been 14.2" long.
The upper tube was the correct length at 7.6" long.

I didn't notice until the decals were being placed.
It's not a problem, a scale builder might notice the difference. You can see a wider space between the two yellow bands.
I was simply sent a tube that wasn't cut to the correct length.

The Phoenix still looks great and will fly fine with the extra 3.75 inches.

The folks at Wolverine assured me all the kits had the correct length tubes. I simply got pre-production parts and one tube was the un-cut stock length.

This is a BIG model, I've seen one perform well with the recommended D12-3 engine.
An 18" parachute is included, I might go with two 12" parachutes or a single 24" chute.











Next up - The Estes V2!

No comments:

Post a Comment