Weasel Progress and Performance Estimates

The third and last piece of fiberglass spanning the fins is now on the rocket. The other 2 pieces are sanded smooth and I've been trying to figure out what to do to make them neater and nicer to finish. What I've come up with is to lay a similar piece of very light fiberglass cloth over the finished pieces. This fiberglass is light enough where I can carefully brush the West Systems epoxy onto it until the entire piece is stuck.

I also will cut these pieces to extend all the way to the edges of the fins, slightly beyond the leading edges at the root of the fins, and to the aft end of the body tube. So far I've finished one of these pieces and I'm confident that it will sand very nicely. 

The red outline is from the previous piece of fiberglass. The light stuff is nearly impossible to see when it's wet but it spans all the way to the edges of the fins, unlike the heavier stuff underneath.

I've also began sanding, filling and priming the nose cone and main recovery bay. Playing around with Rocksim and the colors of spray paint I already have, I have come up with the following simple color scheme:

The only difference is that I plan on doing one fin yellow, and continuing the yellow as a vertical stripe all the way up to the gray coupler tube.

I also have a good idea of the expected performance based on the Rocksim simulations. Here are the 29mm motor simulations:

And here are the 38mm simulations:

It is obvious that anything above a medium impulse I motor will push it supersonic. My goal is to fly it on the I284W. That motor has plenty of white smoke so it would at least be possible to follow for the 2 seconds of the motor burn. I'm pretty sure if I went with a blue thunder motor for the mach flight, it would be impossible to see much of anything because that propellant doesn't put out much smoke.