This weekend we spent a few hours on the rebuild of the Acceleron III booster. The booster is now completely disassembled. We can reuse three of the lowest bottles from the booster so that's good. They were new anyway and don't show signs of excessive stress. We made a new base-base coupling to replace the lost one. We replaced all the regular bottle caps used in some of the couplings with longer thread ones and put reinforcing rings on those. This was done for additional reliability, as we have had the smaller lids let go on previous occasions with other rockets. The pod is now also repaired.
One of the things that was quite apparent before the explosion was that the sustainer had quite a wobble to it when it was sitting in the staging mechanism. A number of fellow wrocketeers mentioned that the sustainer could snap off during take off, so we took their advice and started adding better support for the sustainer. This is now mostly complete, but we had to remove the fin assembly on Tachyon and will have to attach fins a different way.
We will also do a couple of burst tests on these particular 2L bottles we are using to see if the upper limit of these bottles is similar to other 2L bottles we have tested. One of the tests will include a coupling.
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