Struts made of plastic profile, attached using poprivets.
Detail of strut.
The bottle holds Velcro tape. It sticks very well.
Attached fin.
As well as the fins I made another adjustment. I wanted to be able to launch bigger payloads. ESA did that with Ariane rockets by putting a bulbous top on the rocket.
I did the same thing by using a bottle that had a hour-glass shape. The top and the bottom were quite bigger in diameter than the middle. I used the bottom part for the tomy timer and in-flight camera. And the big top (nose cone) is so big that it easily holds a parachute and a nosecone camera.
Part holding tomytimer (top of picture) and camerabay (bottom).
Big nosecone for ample space...
The bottom of the bottle dents inward giving even more space for a big parachute.
The nosecone camera is something I’ve been wanting to do some time now and it gave me a few interesting frames after the nosecone ejected. The whole eject mechanism is designed by AirCommand and is pretty dependable in doing the trick. So far I’ve had deployments on every launch since I’ve been using this system. It’s easy to make and hard to break.
The nose of the rocket is a ping-pong ball and also holds a foam part. That part has a cut-out that holds a gum-stick camera.
The foam was glued in using polyurethane glue.
The camera is being held in place by a small piece of velcro.
The pinhole in the top of the camera is the lens.
During the first launch my oldest dependable rocket sprang a leak, I never noticed until it launched, for some unknown reason I failed to see that pressure was dropping. The in-flight video is in the bottom YouTube film. It landed so awkward it broke in half. The bottle cap broke. The tomytimer broke too. It will be fixed soon and degraded for testing purposes.
The film just below is of a previous launch session with the first efforts of tomytiming. The rocket was just three liters, in the picture above it was six. The modular sections make it easy to lengthen the rocket and add a few liters of fuselage.
The latest rocket with the Velcro fins and bulbous head is in the video below.
The second and third launch went way off trajectory. This was due to the rubber band I used to keep the tomy timer at bay prior to launch. Although the rubber band would easily slip off when the rocket sat still, during launch it would hold on pretty tight. Right after launch the rocket would get caught, turned over and after that the rubber band pops loose and the rockets flies sideways!
I shot a building with the rocket and was lucky that it had a ladder connected to the wall that let us get on the roof and retrieve it.
The missile...