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....

Built a Saturn V many years ago and recently was destroyed by a ground water problem in the basement.

Glad that it was reissued in the larger scale model like I had to build another one that takes E class engines. Mine had a D Class engine.