Components

Construction

As I noted earlier, this project was literally a junkpile before I started construction.  There's a very good chance that the only part of this bird to ever be used again would be the nose cone.  I was in the midst of cleaning my shop and refurbishing some of the older members of my fleet.  I had an Astron Avenger that I built back in 2001 after finding the transition in an Estes Designer's Special.  The Avenger was a great bird, but was showing serious mileage.  One particular area of concern was the BT-50 upper section that had been damaged by contact with a fin after one of the Estes shotgun ejection charges.  Since the tube was glued to the transition and I was using a generic PNC-50 anyway, I opted to replace the entire payload section with parts I'd bought at NARCON from BMS.  I almost threw out the old tube and transition, but realized that I could save a good portion of the BT-50 by cutting the damaged part away.  I started trying to come up with another design for the shortened section before it occurred to me that with a touch o' the Dremel, it could be the lower section of a whole new bird.  Looking around the shop I found a partially crushed length of BT-55, a PNC-55AC with no clear ancestry, and a set of fins that I'd  misplaced after cutting them out for a project out of Peter Alway's Scale Bash.  Putting all of this together resulted in the finished Zorch.  All I had to do was sand the paint off of three spots on the old transition for the fins, hollow out the transition with my Dremel, and fit a 2050 centering ring at the old bottom/new top of the transition so that I'd have an anchor for a piece of Kevlar.