Semroc Spaceman Build 1

Hello all. I’m deviating from diving in to building the Big Berthas I have (Baby Bertha, Big Bertha, Super Big Bertha, Boosted Bertha) in favor of building another Semroc Retro-Repo kit, the Spaceman. I had such a good time building and flying the Semroc Micron I wanted to do another Retro-Repo. Here’s a photograph of the kit panel (actually printed on the instructions):

It uses the little 13mm motors and is supposed to max out at 300’ on an A10-3T. The original used tumble recovery. This redesign ejects the whole motor tube, which comes down via streamer, and the main body comes down via featherweight recovery.

Here are the kit components:

Once again I ignored the instructions, which start out having you marking the body tube and gluing on the fins, in favor of applying CWF to all the balsa. Here’s the second batch drying:

I already coated and sanded half the pieces. That used up most of my thinned CWF so I mixed up some more, a little thicker this time, to coat the above batch and the nose cone. I think it may do better; I believe I sanded all the CWF completely away in spots on the first batch. I’ll have to redo those.

Did I mention what a blast I had launching my Micron (and Satellite Interceptor) Sunday? I had forgotten the sulfurous and seductive smell of rocket motor exhaust. It made me smile and Robb turned to me and said, “I love that smell” and I just laughed - he gets it.

So after letting the balsa all dry (after redoing the first batch) here’s what everything looked like after sanding:

Everything came out silky-smooth, save for the odd dimple here and there - this fin stock seems thinner than usual and I easily pierced fins mounting them on the music wire. 

I also filled the tube spirals with CWF. Here’s before & after shots:

As well as the nose cone, after sanding:

I’m unsure what the odd striations are in the cone; I can’t feel anything there.

There are 4 fins on Spaceman. Two make up his legs and the other two are support structures as well as fins. The kit supplies a little fin jig to ensure the fins get attached perpendicular to the body tube. Well, here’s what it looked like all together:

 

In retrospect, looking at this photograph, the fin on the right is clearly perpendicular to the body tube - it’s just come completely off the marking line for the fin lol. Naturally I failed to notice this until the glue had all dried. Another fin was crooked as well but luckily it popped off easily when I removed the jig so I re-glued it and eyeballed it to get the alignment. 

My opinion of the fin jig:

Lol.

So the next step was to dig the fin jig back out of the garbage because the instructions next state to use it as sort of a template to assemble the little balsa strips that make up the box that surrounds the fin tips:

So far this went together well.

My biggest issue with this kit thus far is that the fins have these tiny little points as part of the “sockets” that accept the arm & “hand” pieces. These points break off very easily, as I’ve tried to show in the below composite photo:

I’m pretty sure I can still get everything to stick together ok but it won’t look as nice as the photograph on the package.

Here are the “arm” pieces:

Again, on the one on the left, some “points” have broken off the little socket. I plan on using straight CWF to take care of those gaps.

All righty, this little fellow is close to being finished. More soon!