Brief:
When it comes to flight profiles, I almost always prefer a ‘low and slow’ flight. You see more of the smoke, and hear more of the noise. You see the whole flight, including ejection. Moreover, you maximize the odds of finding your rocket! However, it seems that I always have to have one ‘disposable’ 29mm rocket in my fleet. At the last MDRA launch, someone returned my Negative Camouflage, which I thought I had lost on an F10. To celebrate, I put her up on an E9. Well, the rocket hung on the pad, went horizontal, found a large launch rail, and pretty much disintegrated. I was in need for another disposable, when I found a Quest Nike Smoke at the Performance Hobbies tent. It appeared to be just the right diameter for a 29mm mount, and I thought the plastic cone and fin can looked cool.

Modifications:
For this modification, I retained the cone, fin can, body tube and launch lug. The rest went into the parts bin. I never found the plastic tip for the cone. I don’t know if it was missing, fell into the couch, or whatever. I decided not to worry about it since the cone doesn’t look bad without it, the epoxy and weight that I’ll have to put into the nose will provide plenty of support, and I will probably lose the thing anyway. I glued the two pieces of the cone together using thin plastic cement.

I tested both LOC and Giant Leap 29mm tubing and found the LOC tubing was perfect. The ID of the rear of the fin can is a little bigger than the OD of the tube, but the 29mm tube fit nicely into the fin can’s shoulder. It wouldn’t slide all the way through because there is a small lip at the tip of the shoulder, which I promptly ground off. To provide more support, I cut about a 1" section off some junk tube I had laying around, sectioned it, and found it made a perfect adapter for the aft end. These components were epoxied together.

The kit came with a piece of Kevlar® string and some round elastic. This would be fine for the stock kit, but I decided to use the Kevlar® string and long piece of heavy, bright orange, tubular elastic (approximately 4') from the Negative Camouflage (not much else was left). I looped the Kevlar® around the front of the motor tube, and epoxied the fin can assembly into the body tube. To make room for all this cord and a streamer, I cut the back end off the nose cone. I knotted the elastic and buried it in a mix of epoxy and lead shot at the tip of the cone. I put in enough weight so that the CG would be approximately 14" from the tip of the nose. Plenty to keep it stable on a G80 (BG).

That’s about it. I also attached the plastic lug provided with the kit using epoxy.

I didn’t want to put much effort into finishing so I left most of the rocket alone. The whole rocket was already white, so I just painted the fins fluorescent red and yellow, and the nose cone tip black. The kit came with peel-off lettering for the ‘UNITED STATES.’

Flight:
I decided to use a wimpy F23-7 for the first flight as there was over 10 mph winds. I made a masking tape retainer and filled the lower portion of the body with dog barf wadding. I used a 5' length of 1" fluorescent red plastic tape as a streamer. I wanted to use the wider streamer recovered from the Negative Camouflage, but couldn’t find it at the last minute. The thinner streamer is a little too small for a soft recovery, but it should help make the recovery visible.

The rocket disappeared in a cloud of dark smoke and didn’t re-appear until the end of the day. It was at the edge of the main field, away from where we spotters were looking. My thanks to Richard Hickok for finding it! It was in perfect shape and is ready to go again.

Summary:
I normally am not a fan of simple kits, but I have to say this kit impressed me. The plastic parts were good quality and the detailing is great. The recovery components are also nice. I really like the Quest’s chutes better than Estes’ chutes (even though I didn’t use this one). Finally, at $8 the price was right. The conversion was easy and it held up fine on the F23 with what was probably a fairly hard landing.