Building the Estes Luna Bug

Here’s a tiny rocket that I took an unconscionably long time to build.

So I’ll say it up front: I am not a fan of Hobby Lobby. I am a fan of religious freedom, but I am also aware that no rights are absolute. There always are limits. And when the religious views of a corporation’s executives harm the corporation’s employees’ access to healthcare, I say that’s one of those limits.

So I don’t shop at Hobby Lobby much, even though they have some rocketry stuff and a perpetual 40% off one item coupon.

Things have changed recently, though. Anything with a price sticker saying “Your Price” is excluded from the coupon, and that includes the rocketry stuff. On the other hand, “Your Price” on a pack of B6-4s is $5.99, more than 40% below the list price. I don’t remember what Hobby Lobby’s old price was, but my guess is not much less after the coupon, and you don’t have to make two visits or send your kid through a different register with their own coupon if you want to buy two packs of motors any more.

Anyway, I needed a few B6-4s for an upcoming launch, and I decided to get one pack at HL despite my usual aversion.

But another thing has changed, which is that Estes has made a deal with HL to supply some HL-exclusive kits, one of which is the irresistably cute Luna Bug, a Mosquito-size 13 mm rocket with landing pads on the fins, priced at $4.99. And of course as soon as I saw it I thought “BT-80 upscale!” Well, that and “Launch the little one at Walt’s Secret Santa in November!” So I bought the kit.

First step of course was to scan the fins and measure the body tube length. How else am I going to be able to do the upscale? And when you scan fins or decals (this thing has no decals) do remember to put a ruler on the scanner bed as a size reference, and for the fins, make a note of the material and its thickness.

In the case of the Luna Bug, the fin material isn’t balsa but cardstock, 1/16″ thick. Presumably that’s because the cutouts would make balsa too fragile.

Right away I noticed the cardstock wasn’t flat. I’ve successfully flattened crumpled paper before using a combination of pressure and humidification. Similar treatment might work for warped cardboard, except that in this case the cardboard had a coating that looked likely to thwart any attempts to humidify it. So aside from the fact I was working in the basement I didn’t concern myself with humidification. I just put it between flat pieces of wood and piled weight on the top, and left it for more than a week. At the end of that time it was… better, but still not flat. I carefully rebent it and got it satisfactorily flattened. I might have been able to do that right away and saved a week, but I was hoping to get away with a gentler approach.

Building was pretty straightforward, except that this rocket is designed to spit the motor, and that’s maybe okay for Secret Santa but it’s definitely not okay for club field flights. So I did much the same thing I did a few years back with the Mosquito. Instead of gluing in the nose cone I shortened the nose cone shoulder a little, to accommodate a thrust ring glued into the body. Then I epoxied a thin piece of braided Kevlar into the nose. The other end has a lariat loop to go around the motor. The Kevlar’s thin enough to run between the motor and the body tube.

I held off on gluing the landing pads until after painting was done, which was longer than you might expect. I think I spent more time painting this thing than I did my Excel. The instructions specify neon green and black, and while I have no particular reverence for Estes’s color choices, in this case I liked it. Neon green’s sufficiently bright and light that it shouldn’t camouflage that much in grass, and I already have plenty of orange and yellow rockets.

But when I went looking for neon green spray paint, initially I didn’t find any. I did find Testor’s brush paint, and I thought, “Hm, never brush painted a whole rocket before, but how hard can it be on something this small”?

Hard. Whatever the technique is to get a uniform, smooth color, I don’t have it. Meanwhile I did find a can of Rustoleum neon green. I sanded the Luna Bug down to the white primer, then sprayed the green. Primer and color were both done with the landing pads pressed on, to keep paint off the tabs on the ends of the fins. Then I sprayed the pads and nose black, glued the pads onto the fins, and applied a clear coat to give the green a little more gloss.

We ended up not flying anything at Secret Santa, so this will have to wait until next year to fly.