Many moons ago I designed built and flew some "Flatpack" rockets for an article for Hackspace magazine. I kind of got obsessed with the idea of a model rocket kit that contains no tubes. Tubes are great, but lightweight tubes are often damaged in mail order rockets! I've also been exploring using cut and score techniques on a vinyl cutter and so the HEXA rocket was born. In this kit therefore, the hexagonal tubes are supplied as flat sheets cut and scored ready for you to assemble.

It's a model rocket designed to fly on 18mm Estes style motors (not supplied) and it's been test flown on estes B6-4 motors with great performance. The kit contains some PETG printed parts for all the parts that will come into repeated contact with the hot ejection gasses and PLA parts for the fins, nosecone and rail lug. It's easy to assemble with some superglue and some PVA and you get an attractive rocket with an ample payload bay for little experiments/avionics/altimeters etc. The all up weight when loaded with a B6-4 is just under 65 grams (the maximum lift off weight for a B6-4 is 113 grams) so you have plenty of weight left for fancy paint or a small payload.

Each kit contains the pre cut and scored yellow card for the upper payload and lower body tubes. The supplied internal centring ring and the base motor mount ring are printed in a green PETG as well as the supplied coupler for the payload section. The nosecone and fins and a launch lug are in black PLA. Also included is a parachute kit and elastic recovery cord which is all really easy to assemble. Note that motors, motor wadding and launch equipment are NOT INCLUDED with this kit. It is designed to use a standard estes 1/8" launch rail with the supplied rail lug. The 3D printed parts are all fine to fly as supplied, the fins and the rail lug need a little trimming and cleaning up and if you want to go fancy sanding the nosecone would reduce drag a little and also be excellent preparation for snazzy paint.

The entire HEXA project is opensource, and all built using opensource tools, so you can easily print your own and not buy a kit! Or you might want to support the project and buy a kit, but make some changes or print/cut some spares or make an entire fleet. If you are at all interested do check out the file repository linked below, there is a 13 page pdf of documentation on there which steps through building both a kit version but also tips and consideration if you are just using the files to build your own. Final note, the kits are supplied in a cardboard mailing box large enough to handle the card section, if you buy more than one I'll ship the additional kits in the same box as there is room for up to 4!

Fly safe, wishing you blue skies and low winds! Jo AKA concretedog.