Plain old 24mm mount. I'm not into flying them so high that you can't see what color they are any more. I'm planning on using it as a demo rocket, like the one it replaced. For the small school playgrounds, low, slow, and loud are where it's at.

I know what you mean about the bugs. I had a few get on it and I had already sprayed over them before I noticed.

As for the Valspar enamel, it handles higher humidities without hazing better than the old formula Krylon and current lacquers from Rustoleum and Valspar. I just wish it would cure as fast.

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I love sanding.

I bought my SEMROC Taurus back in 2006. I built it, sanded, primed, sanded, primed, and put the white base coat on soon thereafter, along with some nice bright red for the four nose cones. I didn't have any red-orange and I didn't think regular orange would look good. Anyway, it sat all in white with it's pretty red cones for five years as I procrastinated the labor intensive masking job that it would take to finish it. I finally got around to it.

I masked the aft section after drawing out the roll pattern. The biggest problem was the booster pylons. I'm not satisfied at all with that part of the job. I finally got it masked and hit it with some nice lacquer gloss black. It blushed like crazy. I eventually hit it with a final coat here in the house so that the lower humidity would help keep it from blushing.

I then worked on the top part. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I painted the instrument tunnels a nice deep metallic blue. It was beautiful outside in bright sunlight, but you really couldn't tell it from the black paint inside under normal lighting until you got right up on it. Needless to say, I sanded it off so that it wouldn't darken a lighter shade over the top of it. Unfortunately I didn't have any other shades of blue that I liked, but my son has some Createx airbrush paint. His Pearlescent Blue was just about right.

I've got a couple of Badger air brushes that I got a few years ago when the company was cleaning house. I decided it was time to learn how to use them. My son normally used the air compressor in the shop, but it's so humid now, I'd need a moisture filter. I decided to get a small pancake compressor and use it here in the house. It's just a little 3 gallon from Harbor Freight. It was on sale and, as always happens when I buy something, was put on clearance the day I received mine. I hooked it all up, practice a few minutes spraying water, then opened up the Createx. You are supposed to be able to spray right out of the bottle, but this stuff has become thick as everything. I thinned with water (though I've been reading that you can thin with alcohol, Future, etc.) and let it rip. Had to play with the pressure a little, but I got it on.

Next came the roll pattern up at the top. After fighting with masking the bottom, I decided to cheat and just draw me up a roll pattern and make a decal. I tried several different styles, two bars, three bars, four bars, short bars, long bars, etc. I narrowed to a medium length three bar pattern and a longer two bar pattern. After modeling a few printed on paper, I settled on the two bar pattern. I'm including pics of a few so that some of you who may want to build one in the future can get an idea of what you might like.

Once I got that drawn, I added other drawings for other projects to fill out the decal sheet. More on them later. Last thing to do was apply all the decals. It went smoothly except for the cockpit window decal. I left material between the two sides to make less fragile, but when I applied it, I couldn't get it to lay down smooth. I lifted it and cut a “V” into it and got it back down. There is still a lot of clear between it and it doesn't look too good, so I may make another decal for it later. At any rate, here are some pics. This is right after decal application, so it still has fingerprints all over it. As with the other recent builds, I haven't clear coated it yet, either.

Rattle can dark metallic blue vs. Createx Pearlescent Blue. I like the dark blue better, but it's only cool in the bright sun or a camera flash:


Prospective roll patterns and hatch placements (more next post):

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I love sanding.

Finishing up the post. (we need to be able to have more pics per post!)


Finally done...

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I love sanding.

Gorgeous!

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Up next:
Under construction:
Under repair:
In finishing: Centuri Sabre clone
In primer:
In paint:
Ready for decals:

Bill Cooke
NAR #31312
TRA #19705
SAM #0001
Huntsville, AL

My rocket blog
My rocket fleet

Of the futuristic style rockets, this is one of my favorites. The other would be the Orion. Nice looking build as usual. I like your approach of paper dry runs on the decal/paint configuration—a good idea.

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Retro-grouch

I've had an Orion sitting in primer for a long time. Maybe I'll get around to finishing it this summer as well.

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I love sanding.

That's a fine lookin' Taurus you've so well finished there! Good job!!

I've got a vintage Centuri one in the bag that I've been mulling over as far as that black/white paint pattern layout on the upper and lower sections. It's a nice color scheme Centuri used on that kit, but one really needs nice clean separation lines between the black and white to make it look good (and I just don't like fuzzy paint separation lines at all). Looks like your solution worked quite well in that regards!

I assume the Semroc version separates at the top of the main #13 bodytube, since I guess their kit uses solid balsa reducers? Even though the original Centuri kit used the hollow plastic reducers, I'm thinking about having mine separate at that lower point as well and bring it all down with two separate chutes. I hate (on any kit) to have significant sized pieces banging and clanging against each other after ejection and under chute. I just prefer, if possible, to use multiple chutes and let the parts 'get away' from each other at ejection and save the heartache of finding dinged and damaged paint and parts by they time it reaches terra firma.

Earl

P.S.--Looks like you'll be a needin' them #16 couplers pretty soon now. I'll get that taken care of this week.

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

Yes, it does. I thought about boring out the transitions, but figured it was too much work to fool with. I also didn't like what happened to Bill's Taurus 5 or 6 years ago when a modern shotgun ejection charge blew the thing apart.

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I love sanding.

I thought of doing that too until the realization hit how small the space for the chute would be.


Bill

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It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

Here's my latest build. It's a SEMROC Scrambler, as usual, the pics are before clear coating. Future will make that payload section beautiful, when I finally get around to doing it. I haven't permanently attached the payload section yet so that it will be easy to give it the Future treatment....in the future.

This build has a few firsts and seconds for me. It's the first time I've papered fins with freezer paper. It worked pretty good. I ran into some masking problems with another fin papering build which I will post in the next few days, but no tape touched the fins on this build and it came out great.

Another first was the paint I used for the nose cone and matching fin. I wanted to get as close to the catalog color as possible. I found something close, but it was a lacquer and I had already base coated with enamel due to high humidity and blushing issues that come with lacquer. I found what I was looking for in the craft section at Walmart. It's the cheap 99 cent acrylic stuff! It very closely matches the catalog, though the photo doesn't show it. If you look at the pic, the nose cone doesn't even look the same color as the fin, though they are exactly the same. The color is "Pueblo" and the color match was done by adding layers until it was dark enough to match the catalog. I'm sure the actual catalog model had regular orange paint and the catalog image made it look brownish, but what the heck...I wanted a catalog color.

I thinned the very thick and very cheap paint with Future (pure acrylic!) and a squirt of Windex for good measure. I learned that cheap paint needs to be strained. Since this was only the second time I've ever sprayed anything through an airbrush, I had to learn the hard way. Fortunately, it wasn't much trouble to wipe off with a damp rag and spray again. Next time I will strain my cheap paint!

I decided I wanted my Scrambler to sport "Astron" like the original, so I whipped up the "Astron" decal and the "Good Eggs Fly Estes" decal that were not on the SEMROC sheet.

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I love sanding.