From the wreckage they shall rise...
 

Well, I took pity on a couple boxes of vintage wrecked/unfinished rockets from about 1970/71. They are all repairable, some need more repair than others. So through the rest of the winter I'm going to restore them to flight operation and paint in the spring. I'll post pictures as I progress.

First up are the Centuri Recruiter and Quasar.

The Recruiter was missing 4 of the 6 fins, but all clean breaks. Made replacements using one of the two remaining as a template. Overall it's in good shape, I'm going to mask off the decals and repaint the white to make it look good.

The Quasar was in pretty bad shape. It appears to be an early issue, as it predates the plastic nose with a balsa one and paper canopy. All three ram jet pods were missing and 1 fin. The remaining 2 fins were detached, but unbroken. I cut a new fin and replaced the ram jets with parts from Semroc. Not sure about painting it, 1) just paint the replaced parts with some touch up, or 2) repaint it completely and use replacement decals. Some of it's charm to me is the well used look, but the Quasar is just too cool, I'd love to have it looking it's best.

Sounds great Tim, be sure to post the "after" pics!

Next up I think is a Centuri Chuter-Two, the 3 inch cardboard payload tube was missing, which I replaced with a vintage CPT-82 per a suggestion in the Chuter-Two's plans. I don't think the ST-8 nose cone in the box is the right one, I think it needs to be longer, but close enough for me. It was missing one fin and the other 3 were attached upside down, I carefully removed and reattached them.

Looking good so far. ( I love vintage boxlots, beat up old goodies are fun :) )


Struggle with the repait question myself - bought a large batch of old Centuri stuff a couple years back, still unsure on many - some are well built but never got recovery systems or lugs ( but nice paint, think the owner used the tower I also got ) .

others are flyable, with so-so paint, but I wonder ' do you repaint one where the original vintage fins can be seen under the paint - ie: root edge printing is marked on my Arcon-Hi, so.... although I love my stuff looking better-then-new, should it be saved for historical sake ?

I know up to the builder/ owner, but a good question for the purists...

Keep posting, good stuff.

~ AL

PS: interesting, the recruiter with the old MPC decals.

did you build these originally ? eBay ? local score ? ( wish I could find more to restore, not as easy as we'd like :P )

~ AL

These were not mine, they were an eBay purchase. I know what you mean about seeing the printing on the balsa fin roots, sort of adds historical authenticity to it, you could see it on the Recruiter fins and I think a little on the Quasar until I added the fillets. As for the decals on the Recruiter, there was one or two MPC rockets in the box. I know I could clone these and have them look shinny and new, but I like bringing life back to old junk. Me and my dad used to restore old (but not antique) trucks together, never made much money, but we had a lot of fun doing it.

My 8 year old daughter made me laugh about this purchase. We were talking about buying and selling things and she suddenly said , "Daddy, people will sell almost anything, even garbage. Like this box of rockets, it was someone's garbage, and you bought it." :chuckle:

Next is an Estes K-16 Delta. This one was almost a rebuild. Only one fin was unbroken, I successfully removed it, but decided to not keep it. So, I cut all new fins, lots of balsa for these. I saved the launch lugs and the remnants of the old fins came off fairly clean. The old glue was brittle and peeled off the tubes like tape. The instructions have you mount the booster fins canted to induce spin on the way up and then the 2nd stage has the fins on straight to halt the spin for stability once the second stage kicks in so a picture can be taken on ejection without being blurry. One of the real prizes in the bottom of the box I bought was a Camroc to go with it, it's in very good shape. I don't ever plan to try taking pictures with the Camroc, too much work to cut the film and develop it, and there are much better and far easier digital solutions available today. But it will display nice on top of the finished Delta.

At which point you proceeded to chase down your little princess to exclaim, "See! I told You! One man's trash is another man's treasure..."


Bill

Modify the Camroc with a digital pen camera inside.

Tim, I like the well-worn look of the Quasar and Recruiter. I had a Titan III that suffered after every flight—it was my favorite rocket (nice slow take-offs and it never went out of sight). It got repaired time and again until it finally hit the river. I believe the repairs add character.

The Chuter II looks great—looking forward to seeing the paint.