Brief:
Aptly named, this 13mm 3FNC does zip off the pad. In fact, if it weren't for the bright orange streamer, this would probably be a single-use rocket, vanishing from sight within half a second of ignition.

Construction:
Parts were good quality, and I was especially impressed with basswood fins in such a small/simple kit:

• Balsa nose cone
• BT-5 body tube
• Motor block centering ring
• Laser-cut basswood fins
• Kevlar® shock cord
• Plastic streamer
• Waterslide decal
• Mylar tape strips (trim)

This is definitely a skill level 1, beginner's type of kit, and can be built in about half an hour plus finishing time. The instructions are well written though a bit sparsely illustrated. For a kit like this, though, you really don't need much in the way of drawings or pictures.

The basswood fins are very nice, requiring just a light sanding to smooth the surfaces and round the leading and trailing edges a bit. They're bonded to the BT-5 after marking it using a wrap-around template. This is a minimum diameter rocket, meaning the body tube is the motor tube, so all that's needed for the "motor mount" is to glue a thrust ring inside the BT-5. I cheated a bit and anchored my Kevlar® shock cord to this first, though that wound up creating a tiny bulge on the body tube, as this is surprisingly heavy-duty Kevlar®, at least 150# test. The kit instructions have the shock cord attached via a paper tri-fold, which I doubted would hold up very well through multiple flights, especially with the cord being Kevlar®, not elastic.

The launch lug is tacked onto the body tube about 1/3 of the way up from the aft end.

Nose cone is attached using a screw eye, wrapping up what is very simple and straightforward construction.

Finishing:
I'm not generally all that interested in buying and building such ordinary 3FNC models, but browsing the Red River booth at NARAM for other models, my eye was drawn to the interesting decal on this. It's a "ZIP", but blurred and italicized giving it the appearance of wet paint streaking a bit in extreme speed.

I went with the cover art scheme, laying down two base coats of primer (grey, then white) sanding after each coat. I then hit it with (4) coats of the new formula Krylon yellow, which is so ridiculously thin and weak it still showed a pencilled marking line through all those 4 coats (plus the primer).

After the yellow had cured, I applied the waterslide decal and the (2) peel n stick trim stripes.

Construction Rating: 4 out of 5

Flight:
For the first flight I went with a 1/2A3-2, flying into absolutely clear blue skies and winds around 6-7 mph. It lived up to its name, shooting very quickly up, though the 2 second delay was much too short and it could probably have fared a little better with a -4.

Recovery:
The streamer deployed fine, and if you fly this on an A the streamer will be your only chance of finding it again. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I was flying in a field about a square mile, I managed to land on the access road and chipped a fin. The flight and recovery was otherwise flawless.

Flight Rating: 4 out of 5

Summary:
Sure, it's a basic 3 FNC, but it's relatively inexpensive and at least includes basswood fins and some nice decal/trim. I'll probably try to pack it along as a good "test" model to put up early and see how the upper air winds are behaving.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5