I have always loved the Nike Apache. Estes made a kit several years ago, and it was one of the ones I really liked, but had never gotten, however now I realize just how un-scale it really was. Now, having access to Peter Alway's fantastic reference Rockets of the World, I am able to look up my fa vorite rockets, and it provides me with dimensions, and even configurations, and differetn versions of the same rocket.

While the dimensions for this one are not quite right-on, I date to say that I got close. I am not sure what happened to all of the drawings that I had made for it, but I will tryt o dig them up. Basically, this is a BT-55 four-fin booster, with a basswood nose cone, and a BT-5 sustainer with BT-20 recovery payload, and motor mount. It took a bit of thinking to be able to get this just right, And it also took the use of a CNC router to cut some of the materials. The nose-cone is basswood, turned on a lathe, and cored, with several pieces of acrylic inserted into the core, which hold the staging pins. I opted to go with fabricated inserts, because my first attempt went horribly awry, and just did not work. This method, on this scale is only slightly better, but looks like it could work.

The booster has a 24mm mount, and the sustainer has a 13mm motor mount. I have not yet been able to launch this, because I haven't gotten around to finishing up/figuring out the electronics on sustainer ignition for it yet. This was going to be used as a test-bed for the altimeter that my brother and I made for our altitude competition, and 'Daft Dream' but it has yet to fly, and that altimeter has yet to be built and tested (though I already have several test-articles for it, lol), so it has not happened yet.

I managed to figure out the staging technique, thanks in part to photos from Wedge Oldham's Nike Project, and in part from Jim Ball's Scale Data site, where he made a larger scale Nike-Apache. Both rockets used long pins, or bars on the booster that slid into the bottom of the sustainer to keep things in line, and allow a trouble-free separation. Scaling something like this down is not always easy, or straight-forward, so I did the best that I could with it, and I am fairly pleased with the results, but the experience in having gone through this should pay off when it comes time to make a larger scale version in the future. This is where my fabbed pieces of acrylic came in. I had them cut at work on a CNC router to ensure that they were all the same, and all of the holes were straight. I designed them to fit between a BT-5 and a BT-20, so they act like centering rings for the fin-can, and with the right sized hole drilled in the nose cone, another assembly with the wires epoxied into place, just slides right in, and fits perfectly.