Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - Centuri Viking reproduction build (and a bunch of research)

From this point it’s pretty straightforward, so I’ll only hit spots where things are kind of unusual or where I departed from the instructions.

Of course the first thing one has to do is decide how many fins (so to know how to mark the body tube) and in what orientation. Since a number of the prior builds have been five fins, I opted for three, but in the wide orientation often seen, with the second narrowest edge as the root.

So, after treating both ends of the tube on the inside with thin CA to toughen things up, I marked the body for three fins using the Estes tools for such things. In particular I’m a fan of John Boren’s “portable door jamb” tool...the Ultimate Tube Marking Guide.

Next comes gluing on the fins (nothing special here - I used Titebond). Once they were on I put the model on a Qualman rocketry stand to let the fins dry. These Semroc fiber fins are a bit thicker than the current Estes ones and between that and the Titebond I wound up with much more solid feeling fin attachments than on an Estes Viking I built last spring.

Then the instructions have you glue the nose cone parts together. I packed 1.5g of clay into the tip of the Apogee cone before gluing it up so as to make this one have the same mass as the Akela-1 cone I have.