Bulbous Rockets

As far as I know, there aren't too many High-Power rocket enthusiasts who build bulbous airframes like mine. After I crashed the The Rocket Formerly Known as Black I decided that, not only would I would rebuild the rocket (it was my wife's favorite), I would make a set of molds of every part. My thinking was that I could fabricate new sets of parts easily and quickly. Why? Sell kits maybe? Give them to my friends? Create a TRFKAB arsenal?

All the molds and cast fiberglass parts.	Two-part nose mold (inside/outside).
The inside of the outer nose mold (sounds like a horrid medical condition).	Cut off the tip, add the stinger, and you get the TRFKAB nose cone.
The two-part (left/right) fin mold. The plug is nested in the mold on the left.	The two halves (fwd/aft) of the airframe mold with a complete airframe. My wife wants one for a vase.

Sometime in the middle of the mold-making process I started to think of all the different rocket configurations I could build using one set of molds. Below are some of the rockets I plan to make over the next year or so.

TRFKAB - The first of the Bulbous Rockets to be built from the airframe molds	TRFKAB has of course flown before. Click [HERE!] for details.
The Blowfish Avenger was the second bulbous rocket built from the molds.	The design came from a 1950's era piggy bank found on eBay.
This squatty little guy was named the Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra. The TRFKAB airframe is inverted.	New molds were made for the pods and a conical nose. The fin struts were glassed styrofoam with a plywoood core.
Way down the line will be this project - the Halliburton Marauder. It uses two aft fuselage sections from the TRFKAB molds and the nose cone from the Jupiter Probe.	This one is probably too wacky even for me - but it shows that there is really no limit to the combinations available once you get started.

I learned a lot about making fiberglass molds, most of it the hard way. I could probably have made ten rockets with the time and money it took to make the complete set of molds for the TRFKAB airframe, fins, and nose cone. But now that it's done, cranking out a set of parts is relatively easy. I say relatively -- it still takes a team of two guys six to eight hours to fabricate a complete set of parts (if nothing goes wrong) so I doubt I'll ever make very many. I have no plans to go into business selling them, I know that. But it was fun to learn, and that's what counts.