Below is a whole series of pictures/videos taken during the fabrication of various parts of the airframe. This is intended to be a bit of a log as to how we actually built these parts, such that other people or ourselves can reproduce the work. Comments are added where relivant.
- Nosecone Turning MVI 3595.AVI
- Nosecone Turning MVI 3604.AVI
The barrel nuts that we were able to aquire were too long, and as such, we had to shorten them. Given that a single rocket has 16 barel nuts, and we were making two airframes, and need to be able to esily do this again in the future, we elected to use somthing so simple as a jig and table saw to shorten these in mass. That is an abrasive metal blade on a portable table saw. When doing this, you just need to be slow and smooth. Afterward, the outer and inner edges of the barrel nut are pretty rough. We cleaned up the inner edges by pushing it up into a 90 degree counter sink on a drill press at 400rpm for a few moments, this would take off all the burrs and make it so you could finger-thread a screw into the threads. To clean up the outer edges, you can slip the barrel nut in the middle counter sunk hole of the jig, put a screw in one far end, hold the jig such that the barrel nut wont come out but can spin, then push the edge of the barrel nut on a bench grinder. The grinder will take the burr off while simultaneously rotating the barrel nut, pretty quick and easy.
We need to make 16 fin clamps. We had previously cut them to length and machineed the angles/edges into the ends, but since it was angle, it didn't sit cleanly on the lenght of the rocket. So, we made a top and bottom die with two sides of an arch, having an arch diamater of about 4.5 inches. Then we put the fin clamp between the two dies, dropped it into a holding jig, and smashed it under 20tons of force w/ some distributing bars. We smashed it in three points to make sure we got the whole length.
Noteice in the above image the height of the horozontal steel bar, notice in the lower image that its been smashed, depressed a distance that is visually obvious.
Below, drilling of holes in the fin clamps that will allow them to be mounted to the motor ferring.
Drilling holes in the motor ferring was pretty, line up where you need, mark, put drill bit jig in front of location and drill. The lathe worked great for this setup.
Below is pictures of edge cleanup and hole drilling/countersinking of the nose cone, similar to stuff we had done before.
Picture of first assembly of whole airframe.
