When last we left our Little Joe II project we had just recieved our replacement tube from SEMROC and cut it to match the length of the Estes tube in "Rebuilding the body tube (Part 1). In this installment we will continue working on rebuilding the body tube by applying new body wraps fabricated from thin styrene strips and "N Scale" railroad car siding material.
Starting from the bottom, I applied a .020" thick, 0.25" wide strip flush with the bottom of the tube. Then I cut a 0.90" wide strip of the corrugated siding material and applied that above the first strip.
Here is another view after application of the first two styrene pieces.
Next, to obtain a better simulation of the demarkation line between the upper and lower booster, I used two very thin .020" x .040" strips placed in parallel with a small gap between them. Now this gap is slightly exagerated at this scale but it gives a nice effect. Here you can see a comparison between the stock Estes wrap on the left and the scatchbuilt one on the right.
Above the two .020" x .040" pieces comes a larger 2.05" strip of corrugated material and finally a strip of .020" x .060" material caps off the booster portion. In the above picture, is another comparison with the original Estes wrap. As you can see I'm about .05" short on the whole thing compared to the original Estes wrap. In order to be exact, the longer corrugated piece should probably have been 2.10" instead of 2.05" but I'll have to live with it. Next up we will apply the tunnel covers to finish off the booster assembly and then build a mock-up of our booster in order to perform a paint test. The purpose of performing a paint test is to make sure our paint won't attack the styrene. I don't want any more painting nightmares.
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