The Liberty Bell 7 capsule went together mostly per the model instructions, but of course I left off the heat shield and retro rockets. Instead I made a shoulder out of a strip of cardstock. If you’ve ever wondered what a Mercury capsule with a service module would have looked like, wonder no more. I also omitted one little part that’s not visible when the escape tower’s glued on.
It took me two tries to get it looking this wonky. As opposed to even more wonky, I mean.
Then I loaded up some wadding, an elastic shock cord, a streamer, and a 1/2A6-2 motor, and checked the CG. I found the model needed about 5 g nose weight, if the CP is where I think it is. I put 1 g epoxy into the capsule, knotted an end of the elastic and stuck that in, added six half-gram BBs, and topped it all off with another 1 g epoxy.
At this point, with the motor, it weighed in at about 28 g, or just about 1 oz.
Once the epoxy set I secured the other end of the shock cord with a trifold mount, sprayed the model with dull coat, and called it done.
Rich's Rockets 