Old School Puzzle

 The Thrifty Rocketeer blog continues...

So, for Thanksgiving/Black Friday,  I ordered a 13 mm V-2 rocket kit from a professional manufacturer. It was a good deal, and I needed something small and quick for me to keep busy.

When it came, I was surprised at how small and few parts it had.  A turned balsa wood nosecone, a body tube, a turned "boat-tail" that looks like a transition, and a sheet of 3"x4"x3/32" plywood for the fins. Plus a thrust ring, a stick or spar for internal work, a launch lug, and a few decals. Not much more.  Oh, the parachute is a prepack mylar plastic thing, and the eye-screw is already mounted in the end of the nosecone and sealed with glue in place!

Surprise!  The plywood sheet, though thin, is NOT LAZER CUT!  It's Old School...lay out your pattern and hand cut it out!


The sheet has a template associated with it for positioning the angle of the fins, as well as a template for both a "pod" and the fin.   The fin is 2" long, with a 1" straight edge that runs along the grain, a 1.5" side that continues from that, 3/4" wide at the base, and the curved edge that will hug the shape of the boattail is aprox. 2" long.

Here's the rub...  I want to save as much of the scrap plywood (because of my OCD) as I can... while  maintaining the grain pattern on the 1" side of the fin.  That means, rather than rotating the fin pattern thru 360 degrees, I have only the option of flipping the fin 180 degrees or flipping the pattern over. In most cases, this is going to mean that 1" straight edge will have to be along the 4" side of the plywood sheet.  That allows one less cut to mess up, and keeps the grain running correctly, according to the template pattern. (I suppose you could place two fins back to back so that the 1" length is shared, if you want to go that way.)

Now, I know this was very commonplace back in the day, and today's laser cut fins and parts have spoiled us.  But I wasn't expecting this.

I would like to lay out the pattern so that the remaining scrap plywood piece is as large a contiguous area as possible....to be saved for some, as yet unnamed project down the road.

How much time would you waste on this?

This has been the Thrifty Rocketeer saying, "Save your plywood scraps 'cause you never know when you're going to need them down the road..."

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