Estes Orange Crush Build - One and Done

Good evening. This post is relatively brief. It’s about building the Estes Orange Crush, one of the supposedly simple E2X kits. The post is brief because the rocket is in fact so simple to build. It’s just easy to mess up the finish - see later for more.

The kit comes in a bag. Here’s a photo of the kit panel:

I took all the parts out of the bag and laid them out. There aren’t that many, really:

From left to right, you see the pre-made fins, the two-piece fin can (assembled but not yet glued), the nose cone, the two body tubes topped with their coupler, and a little bag containing the motor retainer ring, the nose cone base, the shock cord, the cool one-piece launch lug, and a pre-assembled parachute.

I started by gluing the two fin can halves together. The instructions suggest using plastic model cement. I don’t like it’s messiness, however, so I elected to use spots of medium-thick, gap-gilling CA. Why this type of CA? It was closest to my hand, lol. Are we seeing a pattern in this blog yet?

So as per my tradition, I over applied the CA despite my best efforts. Some got onto my fingers as I was trying to match up the fin can halves and stick them together. Some CA thus got smeared onto the outside of the fin can - messing up the finish.

While I read somewhere that acetone removes CA, as you can see above I didn’t have such good luck with that. It just sort of smeared everything around. So having gotten my traditional finish-messing-up done straight away, hopefully this will be as bad as it gets. Fortunately these areas on the fin can later get covered with some of the stick-on decals so it’s pretty well hidden.

The next steps went by so swiftly I forgot to document them. That plus my wonderful wife Bridgid was waiting so we could go pick up cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory lol. These consisted of gluing the fins onto the fin can, gluing the launch lug onto a body tube, gluing the fin can into the end of the body tube containing the launch lug (farthest away from the lug), gluing the coupler into this body tube, then gluing the remaining body tube onto the coupler.

For gluing the fins on, the instructions again called for plastic model cement. But the Estes D-Region Tomahawk I recently built likewise had plastic fins glued onto a fin can (albeit through-the-wall). Those fins kind of popped loose with minimal handling and I had to redo those with epoxy so I started with epoxy right away on this kit. I was proud of myself on the glue discipline, the fins only look minimally sloppy. There’s no real way to fillet them from the outside but I plan on filleting them from the inside with epoxy putty since it won’t be seen so it won’t matter if they look horrid.

I thought the launch lug was cool. It’s a thin plastic strip with loops on either end, to accommodate a 3/16” launch rod. There are little plastic bumps under each loop. You draw a light line down part of the tube and make a mark on the line 6” down. Then you press the lug strip down, with one end lined up on the mark. You press it in hard enough to get the little bumps to indent the tube. Next you take a hobby knife and make little holes through the indentations you just made. Finally you apply adhesive to the tube (epoxy again, in my case) and press the lug onto the tube with the bumps going into the freshly-made holes. I like this because with two piece lugs part of the difficulty is getting them both lined up and this one-piece design takes care of that issue.

So anyway I didn't take any more photographs until all this was done. Here’s what it looks like to this point:

Of course the nose cone isn’t on yet. But from this angle the finish looks mighty fine! I still have to add the treacherous decals however. Here’s what the assembled nose cone looks like:

I finally used tube-type plastic cement to assemble this lol.

OK I actually DID go on to finish the bird, and the decals went on magnificently! Here’s a photograph:

Now to get ready for the launch! I may launch this on a D12-5.