I used the liquid cement to assemble the halves.
The liquid cement dries very fast. To start I brushed a line of of glue along the slim flat leading edge. I drew a pencil line on the fin to show where the first glue line goes.
The two halves are pressed together.
TIP: Now I can brush the liquid cement over the outside seam of the outside and trailing edges shown on the left.
Don't worry about any glue that shows on the outside edges.
After the glue dries, the leading, outside and trailing edges are sanded flat.
On the left you can see the trailing edge after sanding was started. There is still some reflected seam showing.
On the right is the trailing edge of the fin after sanding until the seams disappear. No filling!
Assembly time so far:
9:10 minutes previous
0:25 minutes this post
9:35 hours total
Chris, I used your hinge technique from the 2157 build and it still worked great! Having bad memories of the fragility of the old vacu-form fins, I did reinforce these fins on the inside with a little epoxy and used the technique you described in the 2157 build of cutting a piece of the left over plastic to cover/reinforce the trailing edge. Probably overkill for these new fins, but I felt it was better safe than sorry for the build I plan to actually launch!
ReplyDeleteHi Eric,
DeleteI don't think these fins need the extra reinforcement, but it can't hurt! The new styrene fins really strengthen things up.
The vacu-form fairings are still the weakest link in the kit.
I agree with your assessment of the fairings. I am building this kit as an almost stock build, but I have a few of the new kits and I think I will try another build with custom built fairings (along with some other mods). Maybe out of body tube material? Have you run across any blogs out there of someone building the fairings from scratch?
ReplyDeleteOne nice thing I have to give Estes a huge amount of credit for this time is that virtually all the parts and pieces of the new kit are available separately. That is so awesome! Not only do we get easy to find replacement parts, but, as others have noted, we can retrofit older Saturn V kits.
Hi Eric,
DeleteI don't know of any builds where scratch fairings were made. The smaller Dr. Zooch Saturn V has fairings made from body tubes, but that wouldn't work on a model this big. You've got to keep the low end of the rocket light! My one previous Saturn V kit in the box has the hard plastic molded fins. It is good to have new replacements available.
Sirius Rocketry has a molded set but they are currently out of stock: https://www.siriusrocketry.biz/ishop/search/results.html?search_in_description=1&keyword=Moldin%27+Oldies