Semroc Micron Build 2

Hi again, hope everyone is well and safe and sequestered from the dreaded virus. So to my surprise, my music wire showed up today! It turns out that I serendipitously ordered just the right size. When I looked for “music wire” I found out that there are a TON of different diameters available. So I searched for “music wire rocketry” and I got some hits but none specified a diameter. So as I mentioned in my last post I guessed on 0.025” diameter wire. It arrived in a long tube, which actually would make a decent rocket itself. I thought I had ordered 5 pieces but it turns out I had ordered 5 packs of 6 pieces, each 36” long, so now I have a bunch of this stuff lol.

As I mentioned previously my goal was to insert a piece of the wire into the root edge of a fin, to be able to have something to hold it with as I paint on thinned CWF. It turned out that this diameter wire fits perfectly into the root edge of my fins! In retrospect, considering that the thickness of this balsa stock is 1/16”, I could have calculated that it would be ok but I’m not that nerdy.

So here’s a photograph of a piece of the wire. It’s resting diagonally across the fin stock:

I had already cut a piece of it down into 6” lengths. That’s the rest of a little bundle of the wire in the top of the pic. For some reason they look all rusty but they really aren’t.

Here is a pic of three of the fins after removing them from the stock and sanding them lightly. I had read somewhere what a delight Semroc fins are as far as the quality of the balsa goes and that’s really true. I don’t know if you can tell from the photograph but they look like they’ll require little filling:

The next step was to thin some CWF. Mine came in a squeeze tube. I had no practical way to measure out a portion of the CWF so I just squirted some in to a little plastic container and mixed it well. I just eyeballed the water and at first I put too much in so I added more CWF. My goal had been at first to reach the consistency of mustard but I went way past that. After adding the second aliquot it did reach the consistency of the thin Chinese mustard one often finds with delivery food. I didn’t photo the end result of the mixture because I couldn’t think of a way to convey its consistency with a still photograph, and I’m too lazy to video me pouring it from one container to another or something fancy like that.

But overall I was happy with the end result. I used a cheap paint brush to swab the thinned CWF onto a fin while I held it by one tip. Then I held it by the music wire to paint that tip, and inserted the other end of the wire into an edge of my newly-arrived Super Big Bertha’s box:

As you can see, I put it on a little heavy. It’s collected at the bottom of the fin and looks perilously close to dripping off onto the carpet at any second lol. My lovely wife Bridgid may not be so cool with model rockets after all when I’m done with this build lol. I believe the excess CWF will dry, however, and sand out ok. If not: well,”Not-So-Good” is part of my blog’s name, isn’t it?