Semroc Micron Build 7

I’m back, after a couple of day’s hiatus. When I left off last, I was apprehensively anticipating painting the Micron. It actually, for the first time in a long time, went pretty well. I used Krylon Colortyme (I think) gloss white paint and tried to gently coat the whole rocket in light mists, over & over. I got a little run on the nose cone but after the first coat dried I took the rocket upstairs & sanded the whole thing with my little sanding sponge. Here’s what it looked like after the first coat and light sanding:

The serpiginous bulge is still obvious above the fins. But I noticed that my efforts at going back to re-apply CWF into a spiral on the body tube paid off - looking closer, you can see one spiral still obvious but the one above it, into which I reapplied CWF with the back of a #1 blade, is scarcely visible at all:

So the #1 blade/CWF for filling spirals is going to be part of my routine henceforth. Though it’s tedious, it really works. 

Oh, and the ratty-looking epoxy putty fillets? How do they look now, with a nice fresh coat of gloss white?

Frankly hideous. This stuff dries rock hard too! It would take a heroic effort to sand this down to look nice and would likely require use of a Dremel, which could easily destroy a fin so I’m going to live with these and try and apply the epoxy putty with some forethought and discipline next time.

I let the paint dry overnight and then sprayed a final coat of gloss white:

And the Micron is almost done. It overall looks pretty good, except for the fillets of course. Even the other spiral filled in some just with the second coat of paint/primer (the one I used is supposedly both paint and  primer).

The very last bits of construction involve applying the decals, then cutting away part of the big decal to allow for gluing the pesky launch lug back on. Decal application can frequently be challenging for me for some reason - they wrinkle or tear or dry too soon or something. But these went on nicely and I love the look:

If you notice, the column of red checks on the far right side of the rocket appears narrower than the column to its left. That’s not a trick of photographic perspective or anything, the column really is narrower. This turned out to be totally serendipitous because I need to mount the launch lug right along the narrow column’s line so I just have to trim away two little red squares (rectangles, really) and scrape some paint off and glue the lug back on - this time with epoxy, I think.

So this Micron edition of the blog is winding down. There is supposed to be a launch this Sunday June 7 from noon to 4:00 PM at a Hisey Park around an hour away. I’ve been in touch with the very nice folks of the Southwest Ohio Rocketry Association and it is sponsored by them. This will be the very first organized launch I’ve ever attended. So I’ll post one more Micron entry, to document placing the launch lug and the bird’s first flight!

Meanwhile, I’m going to consider starting my Estes Orange Crush kit tonight rather than the Baby Bertha. This is so I might have another rocket ready to fly by tomorrow. But I’m not going to sweat it if I can’t get it ready, I may not have motors for it anyhow. More later!