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LUNAR'tips from LUNAR-General

Thanx Bob, what a great flick. In my book, this is a must see for all, if your into rockets or not. But I'm afraid it's doomed to failure. Not one car chase seen. No cars launching themselves into sub orbital flight and landing in a plate glass window. No grandiose pyrotechnic displays.. Not a single gun fight, knife fight or even a karate fight. And no sex.. Can you believe it. No sex. And to make maters worse, the audience applauded at the end. I can't remember the last time an audience applauded at the end of a movie. I'm sure Hollywood will be filing law suits any minute now. In the mean time, I'm taking my wife and kids (i.e. TNT Ballistics) to see it this weekend.

Tissueing a balsa surface (Brett Buck)

Putting Japanese tissue or silkspan on balsa surface is pretty standard for free-flight and control line models. The purpose is both to improve and lighten the finish, and to strengthen the part without resorting to using R/C wood (heavy). For improved finish purposes, this means that you don't actually have to apply a ton of filler to fill the wood grain. It also "sizes" the surface and prevents it from developing cracks along the grain as time wears on. It also works quite well for rockets fins, and this is my default method. You only have to fill the tissue, which takes far less material and is thus much lighter. It also creates stiffer part for nearly free, as stiffening the outside surfaces takes less weight than trying to use a very heavy material through the entire part. The insides of parts don't contribute too much to rigidity, so might as well make them light.

Ejection Delays and Weight (Dave Roach)

Rocket kit products tend to be optimistic in their specs on launch weight and give correspondingly long delay time recommendations. Some of the delays I've seen recommended border on the ridiculous. Knowing the finished mass of the the model you have built is a plus. I think some kit mfgrs. (Eg. LOC) just pile all the included model parts on a scale and give the weight with no paint, epoxy, fillers, etc. counted in the total. For this reason it can be helpful to select motors _after_ a project rocket is completed rather than order them up front with the rest of the parts

Information date: May 26, 1999 lk