In Primer
 

The weather has been nice lately, so I decided to complete building some new projects and start finishing some old ones.

As a result, I have a whole bunch of models "in primer" right now.

I hope to have these painted for launching next month. Some will have quicky paint jobs, others "catalog" finishes.

The attached picture shows, from left to right:

* A mostly-original Estes ARCAS, which I first built in the late 70s. I did a terrible job, as was typical of the time. The paint looked like house paint, applied with a house paint brush. I stripped off the fins, boat tail, and paint; de-kinked the body tube with a coupler; and repaired and reinforced the split front edge with some silkspan and yellow glue.

I used basswood for the replacement fins. They are not totally scale, but they're close.

I still have the original decal!

* A Semroc Jaguar. Nice kit!

* A home-brew recreation of the Jaguar. If you look carefully you'll see that the fins are thicker. Very close to the original design and materials, although I used Kevlar cord rather than a steel cable for the shock cord anchor. Also, the fin reinforcements are fiberglass.

I started buying parts for this recreation maybe three years ago, when I started on my other Centuri "large scale rocketry" clones.

* An identical Jaguar. One of these will fly on small "safe" motors; the other will go up on an E9.

* A Semroc Scorpion. This one would have been tough to clone, because of the oddball body tube size.

* Semroc Astro 1. Amazingly, I never bought an Astro back in the day. I had at least two Microns and a Javelin, but never this one. Built this in an afternoon last week to unwind.

* An upscale Ranger . . . or maybe an upscale Big Bertha with a cluster mount. It doesn't have a payload section. Three 24mm mounts. I got the finless tube with mounts from an OROC member who was cleaning out his closets. I added the fins and cone.

If I feel really ambitious, I might decide to retrofit it with a payload section so that it will be a true Ranger upscale.

Not shown: A painted Estes Deep Space Explorer, waiting for decals.

Stefan

Which paint scheme do you plan to go with on the Bertha? I think I'm going to go WAY back for Bertha #2 and do that hot pink & black look from the b & w catalogs. (I should say, "what I always perceived was a hot pink and black look".)

If I leave the Bertha as a Bertha, I think I'll stick with something simple, like the yellow, black, and white design shown in the 1971 catalog.

If it becomes a Ranger, I think I'd go for the 1970 red/white/black design. (Also seen in the 1964 catalog!)

I'm more and more tempted to go the Ranger route. I'm pretty sure I have a bulkhead and coupler to do the job.