Construction

I had originally purchased the plans for this one back when I bought and built the '57 Goony (kit bash #7) when Excelsior was still in New York. Cash flow was low at the time when I wanted to order all the extra parts (mainly the NC's) so I decided to wait till the sixteenth Baby Bertha kit bash to do it plus I didn't feel up to the challenge yet so as such I stored the plans out in the garage for the winter. Unfortunately that was a bad idea as some of the decals were damaged when they stuck to some paper after some how getting damp. I went ahead and reordered new plans and decals, but when I received them the new ones had a Michigan logo in place of the NY one. No biggie, as I live in Michigan anyway, just means their in my neighborhood now .

Anyway, construction started with the 24mm MM and was glued flush into one end of one of the Baby Bertha tubes. I next took all the tubes and marked them for where the vent slots were to be cut. A CRITICAL note here: Make sure you use a fresh blade in your Hobby knife before making these cuts in order to get good clean cuts. Also a small section of aluminum angle iron helps in keeping them straight. At first I was at odds as to how to glue on the tubes and keep the slots lined up when I got the bright idea to tape two quarters together and insert them in the slots of the BT-5 tubes to help hold them in alignment as the glue dried. The Con: to that being that there was a small problem in getting them back out and required the use of needlenose pliers to extract them. After BT-5 tubes were first glued to the lower section the one balsa nose cone was glued in place. I used the balsa NC on the lower section as part of my design thinking as I figured it would hold up better and last longer than one of the plastic ones due to hot gas from ejection charge that would be hitting it.

I then placed one of the plastic Baby Bertha NC's between the BT-5's and proceeded to glue the upper section on in the same manner as I did on the lower. Again the quarters were used and were a little harder to remove with the extra NC in the way but I got great seals around all the ports. After glueing in the bottom PNC-60 to upper BT-60 tube I then glued in all six BNC-5's to their respective tubes. From there the fins were paper coated and when dry mounted and then the launch lugs were attached. After that all seams and joints were gone over and filleted where necessary. The final step was the recovery system. This I installed in typical Estes tri-fold fashion.