NCR Lance Beta repair
 

So, I'm repairing an NCR (By Estes) Lance Beta, to get back to flight status. First, the NC base was cracked up pretty good, so I cut off the bottom and wedge, and epoxied a piece of 3" BT, sliced to make it a bit smaller. To make the shoulder smooth, a piece of thin-wall BT80 was cut to fit the wedge. Lastly, a 1/4" plywood bulkhead was expoxied, with sufficient weight to make it stable up to a 4 grain H. The small hole is where I'll put my RF tracker.

Next, I peeled and sanded the 28mm tube to fit up to a 29/240 Aerotech case. Now, I need to figure out how to handle retention, as I don't have the original plastic retainer. Any ideas? (Yes, I know friction fit could be used, but let's keep the discussion to positive retention).

It's easy enough to retrofit retention into plywood rings, but the plastic is far too thin for threaded inserts. I can imagine some sort of metal retainer that uses the existing slots, or the unused TTW fin slots, but nothing concrete yet.

Looks to me the only way to do positive retention in any sort of non-complicated manner is to add a plywood centering ring aft of the existing GOOFY plastic nonsense originally used in their kits.

Hi Paul,

I used to have a few extras of the red plastic NCRBE retainers that fit that ring. I never used them on my personal builds, but when I recently inherited a Big Brute set up for that retainer, but missing the retainer, I turned the workshop upside-down looking for them. No dice; must've dumped them off at some point.

Solution? The tried and true screw and z-clip deal. I found the centering ring's plastic to be thick enough to be drilled and tapped sufficiently to hold force. I also tried a self-threading machine screw. Both worked great!