Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post

Quote:

Originally Posted by kurtschachner

I have a few unsolicited comments about this list, if you're interested.

Very interested! Consider all comments solicited. We do not work in a vacuum.

Quote:

First off, the scalloped shroud in the original kit is cut from paper. This was then glued to the tank tubes and then the assembly was painted. This is a beast to do and in my opinion the shroud should be made from plastic (like the Centuri and Apogee kits) and the tank tubes painted ahead of time. This is much easier to accomplish.

We started to change to plastic, but the paper has the "look and feel" of the old kits. Plastic would raise the price significantly and vacuum wraps are available oline.

Quote:

Second, the Estes decals did not have a white rectangle behind the "United States" for the black tubes. In the kit you were supposed to mask off four of the white tubes before painting them black. Again I think this is too complicated for no reason.

Agree! Those four decals will have a white background so the tubes can be painted solid black.

Quote:

I redrew the Estes decals and had them screen printed for our group cloning effort so feel free to "steal" that artwork if you like. However, the Estes decals weren't all that accurate. The Centuri decals rescaled to 1/69 would be a better representation (I also have the artwork for that).

Thanks, we will tweak the decals.

Quote:

Now as for that capsule, when we cloned our 100 sets of stuff we could not get those replicated in balsa. We could get the capsule done but not the two small balsa pieces for the escape tower. One of our group members ended up reproducing the three balsa parts in resin and it worked very well. The only problem with that was getting the four tower holes drilled properly in the resin capsule, but I had a machinist at work drill them for me.

The capsule is all balsa so the paper shrould is not necessary. A decal will replace the color shroud. The balsa escape tower cone and nozzle are cut as one part and cut apart by the builder. They are very close to the original.

Quote:

Lastly, for the Little Joe II I have also redrawn those decals from the Estes kit. I can't recall if they are on JimZ's site or not, but if not let me know and I will send them to Scott. I also have a couple original body wraps for this kit you could borrow if you want.
Kurt

Thanks again! We would really like to see some original wraps to try to get ours as close to them as possible.

Our design goal for these kits is to keep them as close as possible to the original and keep them reasonable in price. Our target prices are under $50.00 for the Saturn 1B and under $20.00 for the Little Joe II. We are planning on also including "close-to-scale" laser-cut balsa fins for modellers that that want a flying model and don't want to spend the time with the included paper and rib fins that are based on the original kit.