Optimus and Veritgo Prototype

    Just passing along some photos and videos of my current projects.  Optimus is the humanoid looking rocket with the odd body tube.  To make him we sanded polystyrene into the correct shape and then laid it up with fiberglass.  I did one coat heavy and one coat medium weave fiberglass.  The head is also polystyrene with Bondo and resin on it.  The fins are aircraft plywood with carbon fiber on them and fitted into slots in the body tube (Also used many layers and fillets of epoxy!).  After the layups we vacuum bagged each component.  The inner tube is 2 layers of medium fiberglass.  All that he needs is a parachute and en engine hook.

The most exciting part of this email is the Vertigo prototype.  This is a scale model of my current high power project fixed in recovery mode.  The full-scale high powered rocket version will reach an apogee of about 3500ft.  The prototype began as two fiberglass tubes, both 3 layers of heavy weave glass.  After they dried, I used a dremel tool to cut the bigger tube into 5 equal sized blades.  I then drilled a hole off center at one end of each blade and fixed an L-joint to it.  I attached each of the blades at equidistant angle to provide radially symmetric mass distribution.  After each blade was attached we used a 5-minute epoxy to secure the connections.  A plug for the top was made of polystyrene and epoxied in.  The nosecone was sanded out of polystyrene and filled with lead shot to provide weight and bring the center of mass well below the blades.

The drop tests went much better than expected.  The auto-rotation recovery method we are using require sufficient height to stabilize and then initiate, so ideally a higher drop site would have been used.  In the videos you can see the prototype stabilize and begin spinning.  Very exciting for me, I were not sure how well that design would work.  I will now begin constructed a 2 meter long and 9lb version of this that has spring loaded blades and a GPS/IMU unit for deployment.  Hopefully I will launch with a 54mm J-class impulse motor.

-Aerolite