Brief:
Single-stage, near-minimum diameter hi-flyer. One of THOY's original kits. 3 1/2 feet tall. Uses 18" nylon chute. Relatively big fins.

Construction:
Parts are pretty much all LOC type. Body tube is composed of two 17 inch tubes coupled together during construction. This does open up the possibility of converting one tube into a payload section. Motor tube is 6 inches long; a little short IMO to fly on H motors, but in a minimum diameter kit it doesn't make much of a difference. The 2 centering rings are cardboard as opposed to plywood. Shock cord is standard 1/2 inch flat cord, and is mounted via a cable anchored to the top centering ring. The 18 inch parachute is slightly sturdier than LOC's equivalent chute. I think the kit still comes with a 24mm adapter, which often comes in handy.

There are no construction "tricks" with this kit. A few recommendations: Wrap tape around the forward cable loop, otherwise your parachute will snag on this and not come out of the body tube when it needs to. Shape the fins very well. The fin shape isn't the most aerodynamic so you'll need to shape the leading and trailing edges very well to maximize performance. Drill a small hole [less than 1/8 inch] about 6 inches from the top of the airframe to allow pressure equalization inside the rocket for those high altitude flights. Have a launch rod ready when gluing the 2 launch lugs on [I recommend this when building ANY rocket]. Be ready to switch out parachutes frequently if you plan on doing low and high altitude flights. Just about the only step you find in any other similar kit is the step that instructs you to glue the two body tubes together.

Finishing:
The one thing I LOVE about high power kits is that there is no obligation to paint them any particular way. Like with any other MPR/HPR cardboard/plywood kit, just shave off the molding lines from the nose cone, sand the fins nice and smooth, and use two coats of primer. You may want to fill in the seam between the two body tubes.

Construction Rating: 4 out of 5

Flight:
The manufacturer, THOY, recommends motors starting at D12-3 all the way to H55-14. I've flown this kit with D12's [only goes about 200-300 feet], single-use E's [HIGHLY recommended for flying at your local club launches, stays under 1000 feet], single-use and reload F's and G's [use a smaller chute], and even low-end single-use H's before BATF required a LEUP [goes about a mile]. Not many of my rockets fly as straight as this one. It'll fly on most any motor from 20 to 180 N-sec, although I hadn't yet tried it with Aerotech 29/180 motors. If anyone else tries this, be sure and check CG/CP. THOY claims that it'll go supersonic. The fin shape isn't really conducive to supersonic flight, though one is definitely free to try. There is no motor hook or block, so you'll be friction-fitting your motor in addition to wrapping a tape thrust ring around it. Depending on how you prep rockets [I prep from the top], getting wadding a sufficient distance down the tube requires the services of a launch rod.

Recovery:
The 1/2 inch wide flat braid shock cord is attached via a steel cable anchored to the top centering ring [use plenty of epoxy when gluing the motor mount in place]. I like this anchoring technique MUCH better than LOC's standard inside-wall-of-the-airframe. It has held the shock cord in for more than 20 flights. The kit comes with a little over 4 feet of shock cord. If it were any longer, it wouldn't fit very well in the airframe.

Flight Rating: 5 out of 5

Summary:
This is an excellent kit! I'd recommend it more for the mid-power flyer, not for someone who wants a level 1 certification rocket, even though it can fly on small H motors. Its assembly is very straight forward with a few deviations from standard LOC instructions [body tube joint and shock cord mount most notably]. With the substitution of a bulkhead assembly for the coupler, it can easily be made into a payloader. For those mile high flights, dual deployment isn't such a bad idea. The fin shape is the only other part of the design I would question, but this is mostly a performance issue.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5