Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Estes Space Twister #7258, Part 7, Strange Reinforcement & Green Mask

I mentioned earlier, the BT-50 body tube seemed weak. 
There were two seams to fill, one was the typical glassine seam. The second one was underneath, where the clear glassine shrunk into a slight separation of the brown wrap underneath.  
The tube was already showing crimps from handling when building the rocket. I've never seen a tube this bad since the MRC Enforcer build: CLICK HERE  

I did something I've never done before.
There are flyers that like to "bulletproof" their models by using a long coupler all the way inside the body down to the engine mount.
I know this tube would crimp above the engine mount after the first flight.

I have some long BT-50 couplers ordered from BMS. I slid the long coupler in, all the way down until it touched the upper centering ring of the engine mount. The top was marked, then the top was cut back to clear the nose cone shoulder. The upper picture shows the shoulder allowance marked before cutting the coupler to length.
 
The coupler was slid in without using any glue. I probably wouldn't have gotten the whole length in if glue were used.
The picture shows the coupler inside, you can see the the coupler recess for the nose cone shoulder fit.

This length of coupler added 1/2 oz. weight to the model! I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you couldn't see any other method to strengthen the tube. This is not a high performance rocket, the spinning boost will definitely hurt the altitude. The added heavy coupler doesn't help.


This wasn't an easy mask. The green color is on one side of the fins, and under the spin tab. 

The tape had to be cut thin and tucked into the crux under the top of the spin tab.
The lower picture shows the masking tape over the larger areas.
Green paint coming up - uh oh!

1 comment:

  1. I've had to add couplers inside thin BT-50 right above the motor mount because the ejection charge eventually degrades the tube to the point where cracks and/or blisters appear in the paint where the glassine covers the paper seams.

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