I was so impressed with the performance of my orange Dart at my last launch that I have decided to finally fix up my first Dart. I crashed it years ago and was so disgusted that I simply built a fresh one.
It's demise was due to the failure of a six foot white rubber shock cord. Bad idea.
I lost the payload, nose, and chute while the booster came in ballistic.
It took a core sample from the edge of the pond. Lucky for me it landed in the muck, otherwise there may not have been anything left to work with.
The first item to address was the charred fins. A previous flight attempt with a thrustless E-9 turned the trailing edges to charcoal as it just sat on the pad like a roman candle for what seemed like a very long time.
I carefully cut out the burnt bits and glued in new balsa pieces. Some reshaping, plenty of sanding and a little primer made them good as new.
I added a shrink wrapped, crimped steel cable to the top of the stuffer tube to move the new shock cord attachment further away from the ejection blast. The balsa block under the payload has a dowel insert for the screw eye.
New LT-200 tubes were procured and I gave the nose cone my patented twist lock retention system.
Today I started applying paint to the individual parts. I found a can of metallic black for the final coats. In the sunlight it appears to have four different colors of metallic in the base. I have a set of decals and will use 3/8" or 1/2" elastic with Kevlar backup for the recovery. Will post pics of the finished product in a week or two. The humidity here may affect my paint cure times.