Brief:
This is an 18mm sport "ant" scale model of the Saturn I Block II SA-6 to SA-10.

Construction:
The kit comes in a heavy rectangular 12"x4"x4" box. All parts arrived in good condition and include 4 pages of pre-printed card stock for making the tank tubes and body tube wraps. Other parts include balsa stock for the eight fins, a hand built weighted capsule, fiber centering rings, an elastic shock cord (mounted Estes style), a white garbage bag parachute, pre-cut body and motor mount tubes, a dowel for wrapping the tank tubes, and other assorted bits and pieces.

The instructions are 11 full size and well illustrated pages (the last page provides some historical background). None of the steps are particularly complicated, although some steps do require time and patience. This is clearly a builder's kit but nothing a reasonably experienced modeler can't handle. The instructions are laced with loads of Dr. Zooch oddball humor with lines such as, "Use a semi-soft surface, such as a rubber mat or the skull of one of those folks who believes Apollo was faked...". Step 2 of the instructions calls for pre-painting a number of the parts. In my opinion, several of these should not be painted until they've been further assembled. For example, the capsule should not be painted until after the tower assembly has been installed. And the card stock for the LOX tubes should not be painted until after they have been rolled and glued (not before, as the instructions suggest). Besides painting, there are a number of other omissions and oversights in the assembly instructions, most relatively minor. Dr. Zooch (actually, Wes Oleszewski...Dr. Zooch is a cartoon ant and incapable of manufacturing rocket kits) has read my parallel review on The Rocketry Forum and promised changes in the instructions in future kits, so these issues may not exist for long. And even the current instructions are not so bad as to inhibit assembly for a reasonably experienced modeler.

After the initial painting, you assemble the motor mount tube and tack on 1/32" balsa spider veins to act as seats for the LOX and fuel tubes. The kit includes an engine hook but no engine block. I added my own and also a length of Kevlar anchored to the block. Assembly then moves to rolling the LOX and fuel tank tubes, then gluing them in place around the motor mount tube. Again, I recommend painting the LOX tubes white after gluing, not before as Dr. Zooch suggests. Most of the remainder of the build is relatively straightforward and logical. Only a few warnings. First, the tower assembly comes with a 2" stick that is to be cut into four 1/2" pieces to form the corners of the tower. However, to have good contact with the capsule and LES tower you need to bevel the ends of each piece (something not mentioned in the instructions), leaving less than 1/2" on each side. Rather than have a really short tower, I wound up substituting round toothpicks cut to 5/8" for each corner. The tower lattice is made of small pieces of metal that you cut and tack in place using thin CA while holding with tweezers. The next gotcha was the fin template. I noticed that the fin template would result in fins that had a root about 3/16" longer than the thrust structure they were to be glued to, meaning that they were going to be hanging below the base of the rocket. This didn't jibe with the picture of the model on the Rebar Rocketry website, nor with any Saturn I picture I had ever seen. I emailed Wes at Dr. Zooch to get his call on this and he promptly responded, telling me that he upsized the fins for commercial sales (the picture on the Rebar site was a prototype), but that the model should be stable with scale sized fins. Wes had previously sent me the RockSim files on request, so I spent some time modeling with the scale fins and convinced myself that it would be stable with those. To make a scale fin template I scanned the original template down to 86% of its original size. The next to last step is to build the H-1 engines (well, not exactly H-1's, but itty bitty little lookalikes) out of cardstock, Kevlar, and a dowel. This went smoothly and the engines look downright spiffy! However, using the dowel for the engines (as per the instructions) left me with insufficient dowel for detailing in the last step of construction. I had to purchase 1/16" dowels to complete the kit. Wes has apparently already corrected this oversight by adding another dowel to future kits.

Finishing:
The finished kit really does look mighty cool and well worth the effort. Since you do all the painting as you go along, finishing is nothing more than gluing on some painted dowels for ullage motors, retro rockets, H2 ducts, and other details. Overall, I give it 4 out of 5. The primary demerits are for the instructions and the annoyance of not having sufficient dowel, both of which Wes has already promised to correct in his response to my review on The Rocketry Forum.

Construction Rating: 4 out of 5

Flight:
The instructions offer no advice on recommended motors other than to "shove a C6-3 into this baby and watch it blast out of sight." Well, that was a bit ambiguous for me so once again I turned to RockSim and plugged in the measured weight and CG of my model to figure out that B4-4, B6-4, and C6-5 motors should be okay. First flight was on a breezy day and not wanting it to "blast out of sight", I opted for a B6-4. Also, I opted to use a 15" orange mylar chute rather than the included 15" white garbage bag chute. If it did blast out of sight, a white chute in an overcast sky wouldn't be too good an idea. Launch was good. No problems with stability even with the scale fins, just like Wes said. More oomph is definitely in order though. Looking forward to a C6-5 next time if the wind cooperates.

Recovery:
Recovery was perfect using my substituted 15" mylar chute and my Kevlar/elastic shock cord.

Flight Rating: 4 out of 5

Summary:
Overall this is a an excellent rocket built from a pretty decent kit. Once Dr. Zooch fixes the problems with the instructions and insufficient dowel it will be a great kit. A very fun build and looks great on the pad.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5