Saturday, August 21, 2010

On the mend

So I've now overcome the sadness of Der Red Mix and embarked on DRM mark II:
  • Last night I think I thoroughly mastered both the Parrot2 and Raven altimeters via manuals, testing, and marking of the terminals. I will not repeat my mistakes of last Saturday.
  • I decided that DRMII will use all BlueTube 2.0 rather than phenolic and just ordered four tubes. This should greatly improve strength overall and will reduce my finishing time demonstrably over mark I.
  • I made some small positional adjustments to the mark II design in RockSim as refinements. I think I'll need less nose weight this time for a typical flight.
  • In mark II I can revert to the original position of the Flip video cam cowling so there should be no fin visible this time.
  • I'm considering cutting my own fins and centering rings this time but might still go with laser cutting at BMS. TBD.
  • I'll combine some of Kurt Gugisberg's painting advice with a new support rig I've devised to minimize dust kickback. Hopefully I can avoid car paint pitting this time. I'll also apply the decals before flying to underscore confidence in my revised approaches.
Cathartically this rebuild is now more important to me than attempting 2000MPH at Plaster Blaster in November. Also I just bought my own Pro75 6G hardware set for that flight but I wanna put some miles on that casing elsewhere first. Oh and KO sent her shot of the DRM fail. It better shows how the Flip camera landed safely:

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