Saturday, November 14, 2015

Wow I'm a shiftless varmint

My maternal grandfather, Hank, used to call people of questionable drive "shiftless varmints" [vemin] and that's how I would classify myself in the last several months in the rocketry context.

I last flew at Lucerne in June and at Holtville in October.  I sort of took the summer off from flying because we're making the planet nearly unbearably hot.  Yes its true.  We are changing our planet's climate.  We should reject the disinformation created by the fossil fuel oligarchy and disseminated by corporate shills beholden to them in our government.  But I digress... I couldn't make the November Holtville launch because of an amazing cause.  I was planning to attend Lucerne today as it's no doubt amazing up there but I wasn't sure what to fly as of yesterday.  As such I started designing and 3D-printing electronics bay caps for what remains of the Viciously Mean Machine.   After struggling for a few hours trying to make nylon adhere to the printer's bed I reverted to trusty fluorescent green ABS .  Here's what I modeled in Modo:
VMM-ebay-Modo
And here's the 3D-print preview in Simplify3D:
VMM-ebayCaps-3Dp-Preview
And here are the final prints from my CreatorBot 3D:
These 3D-printed electronics bay caps are not quite what I modeled...
Not quite what I modeled right?!  I think a raft would have remedied the edge curvature near the base but the curved edges at higher elevations confuse me.  I think it's time to re-level my heated bed and try again.  With a little sanding/drilling those caps probably would have worked with an AT 1417K185 today but, by the time I finished the two E-bay caps last night, it was too late to start packing.  Now, at 8:47AM, I can't fathom the concept of driving up there through Saturday morning traffic to hurl a couple of sport flights.  I will commit to doing more rocket building and repair this weekend and hope to post more updates soon.