Saturn V

This supersedes my previous review. My kit had a few glitches but it’s still a great model.
The motor mount rings were quite undersized but I got the mount well secured with Rocket Poxy. The escape tower alignment pins were not correctly molded but I was able to fix that and get the tower perfectly built. The lower wrap requires very careful trimming that is not precisely spelled out in the instructions. You will cut the excess off the top of the wrap very close to the corrugations, perhaps one millimeter. I did it wrong and left 1/4” above the corrugations. This caused the engine fairings to not fit properly. So this was half user error and half poor instructions. A way to get this perfect is to cut out and reinforce one of the fairings per the instructions. Then set the fairing in one of the v notches on the bottom wrap before trimming the wrap. Butt the edges of the fairing right up against the corrugations. Mark the aft end of the fairing on the wrap. That is your bottom trim line. Measure three inches forward of that for your forward trim line. This will get your bottom wrap trimmed perfectly! It’s a very emotionally evocative rocket if you lived through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. It motivated me to load up on Apollo books and DVDs. Holding the finished model, I was transported back to July 20, 1969 like it was yesterday. Kind of choked me up actually.

I finally have another one of my favorite rockets. The original took either a D engine or 3 C engines. I used D for a 100 foot altitude. Hopefully by spring....

The motor mount was extremely loose in the airframe, as another reviewer mentioned. I had to use a lot of epoxy to secure it. The escape tower halves must be glued together and they have alignment pins that engage with little holes. In my kit the pins lined up with pins! And holes with holes. The hole to hole side was no problem, but I had to cut off all the pins to get the two halves to join properly. And so did not get the benefit of the alignment. I did get them lined up manually, with the help of a set of MagEyes magnifiers. The main body tube coupler was a super tight fit, I had to sand it down substantially. I don’t believe this next problem was user error, but you can review my video. The engine fairings sat on top of the corrugations, not down flush in the v notch of the bottom wrap. I had to do some extremely tedious trimming of the corrugations to get the fairings to fit right. I trimmed and installed the wrap exactly per the instructions, but if y’all see an error, post a review to correct me. Still, I really like this kit, I watched the entire Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs unfold as a kid. This really took me back to a time in America that is long gone. Holding the completed model filled me with pride and happy memories and actually choked me up. I’m loading up with books and videos of the Apollo program to re-live it all. But Estes needs to ramp up the QC. Video: https://youtu.be/RZckQud2YL8?si=IqQBlAj6_ljf57hD