For value in boost gliders you'll be hard pressed to beat AstronMike's saucer tripak. The tripak comes with three sizes of saucer style boost gliders. These sport boost gliders are unique in that that work by ejecting weight other than the an engine pod. The key is the payload section (PS) which, via a tube coupler, fits into the rest of the glider's main engine tube section. This PS has weight installed in the form of a permanently glued in spent engine casing. It's this weight that gives each saucer a boost CG forward of the saucer section's leading edge. Once the ejection charge goes off, the motor stays and the PS ejects recovering via streamer. It's this lost weight that shifts the CG aft and induces a glide.

Unpacking the saucers reveals their components. The three saucer sections are precut from an art and crafts material called ArtCor. This is a lightweight style foam board that has slick plastic sides sandwiching the foam. There is no attempt made to cut these as 'perfect circles'. It's all rough cut. If you require symmetry in your life, you'll have to clean up the edges yourself. The saucer's dihedrals were prebent by NA. NA also sets the masking taped gluing surfaces on each. My tripak also came with engine tube standoffs and launch lugs preglued on. The engine tubes are rough hacked as are the payload tubes. Cleaning up the edges on the payload tubes is made more difficult because the "tube couplers" are already glued in.

The instructions are bare bones and appear to be written in Windows 95 Wordpad. There are no diagrams in the instructions. They are concise but assume prior kit building experience and IMO, prior B/G experience. Rounding out the tripak parts are the red plastic streamer material, plastic and wood nose cones for the payload sections, and a long strip of chrome heating duct tape. 

Because NA did so much of the work for me, it took less than a few hours to put together the saucers. Most of that time is spent waiting for glue to dry. You glue on the fixed engine tubes to the standoffs on the saucers. Then you glue the rudders to the masked area on the bottoms, and attach the streamers to the payload section couplers. Next you reinforce the rudder to saucer joint with the supplied chrome tape. I also put a strip over the entire saucer, standoff, engine tube joint. Finally you place a strip of the tape on the top aft section of the saucer to keep the engine flame from melting the saucer. I was so impressed with the holding power of the tape I went out to Home Depot and bought a roll for my own use! You could put together whole B/G's or R/G's with this stuff! 

Now it's time to trim the glider sections. I installed burnt engine casings and balanced the saucers about where NA marked them on the saucers. I used flatten lead fishing sinkers and taped them to the forward engine tube edges as needed. The CG is marked about a third of the way back from the leading edge of the saucers. I gave them a toss. Now you learn a drawback to this design. If the glider stalls or dives, it hits the ground on the engine tube. Guess what crumples? Yup. The tubing. It happened on both the two larger saucers. I wound up replacing both tubes. I gave up trying to trim them this way. Instead I made sure the boost C/G's were at or ahead of the leading edges and trimmed them by observing the glides during actual launches. This proved a better tactic though one or two stalls near the ground can still crumple the tubing, and did. These were repaired with split sections of tubing glued over the original. Of course this adds weight which means re-trimming the gliders! (lather rinse and repeat)

Once trimmed the flight characteristics of these sport gliders are nothing less than superb. Unlike most boost gliders they boost like rockets not like drunken airplanes. They attain much more height than most gliders. They are very reliable and have never red-baroned (glider gets caught in the payload section's (or pod's) recovery system). Their glide is smooth and quite good once trimmed. So far my best time has been close to 40 seconds in dead air with the smallest saucer on a 1/2A. In good thermal conditions there is little doubt you can lose them. And best of all they are crowd pleasers! You'll be a big hit at launches as they always draw stares!

I had seen messages from Astron Mike about his flying saucers on RMR, but I couldn't quite visualize what he was describing with text. Then, he offered a tri-pack of his saucers for a reasonable price and, since I love boost gliders, I decided to try them out. 

I placed my order with Mike during the week before Christmas and my order appeared within the week - arriving on Monday. Unfortunately, the Post Awful was not kind to the package. The saucers were pretty much OK, although the 13.0" one had some crimps in the ArtCor material, but several of the body tubes were crushed. Fortunately, I had some spare BT-20 available to replace the damaged tubing.

The kit consists of three saucer wings (7-1/2", 10-1/2" and 13" diameters) with balsa body-tube stand-offs, three booster body tubes (one BT-5 for the 7-1/2" saucer and two BT-20 for the 10-1/2" and 13" saucers) and two payload sections (one BT-5 and one BT-20 for the two larger saucers). The payload sections are pre-built and use an expended motor for the joiner with a piece of Kevlar® line attached so that it comes out the center of the casing for attaching a streamer for recovery.

Mike does not include engine hooks with this kit. He recommends friction fitting the motor with masking tape, but I prefer more positive retention and added retaining hooks.

The dihedral of the saucer wings had gotten pretty well flattened out and when I re-creased the wing center, the body-tube stand-off popped off. They had been glued with yellow glue to masking tape attached to the ArtCor and the glue did not hold to the masking tape. I e-mailed Mike and he told me he had attached them that way to try to save us (the buyer) some construction time. Since the joint did not hold, he advised me to attach the stand-off with some epoxy, which seems to have made a much better connection.

Mike included some metal (chrome?) tape with the kit which I used for attaching the rudder and weighting the nose of the body tube. One of the other early purchaser's reported some charring of the saucer wings on launch, so I bought a roll of the metal tape at the hardware store and I'm using a strip down the centerline to protect the saucer surface.

Remember to adjust the balance and re-test the glide AFTER you have completed building the saucer. ;-) So far, I've got the 7-1/2" and the 10-1/2" saucers adjusted and ready for initial launch. See the launch reports for how they fly. 

I have only one other minor nit to pick, which I found on my first launch. The streamer got pushed up into the motor-casing joiner at the base of the payload section and could not deploy. I'll mix some tissue and glue to fill this in so it won't happen again.