As mentioned previously, I’m partnering with SBR to build the new L3 Fusion, which you can pre-order now. We decided to film the build from start to finish, in the SBR workshop studio.
My previous high power rocket builds have been relatively slow. Don’t get me wrong – I generally don’t procrastinate, and once I get excited about a rocket project, I dive in and don’t come up for air until it’s complete.
But my techniques are far from perfectly efficient, and there’s often a substantial amount of long-curing epoxy, and then waiting for it to cure. And then… repeat. Each cure takes hours or even needs to wait overnight, and I’m doubly and triply reinforcing everything to make sure it’s sufficiently strong. Plus I’ve only built a few larger high power rockets so far and I was inevitably much slower in the beginning.
With this L3 Fusion build, however, I was able to move at a much more rapid pace. One big reason was using a fast-curing 12 minute epoxy. You just mix the resin and hardener and get to work. With a 12 minute cure, it’s amazing how quickly you can build!
That being said, for purposes of filming every step, this was still a marathon build session. It took a couple days of nonstop construction, even though the steps themselves are pretty simple and there was nothing that I hadn’t done before. At least, in principle. The “marathon” aspect was only because of filming and trying to make the most efficient use of our time.
We did have a few minor technical difficulties. Despite an excellent studio setup with a camera and tripod, external microphone, bright lights, and so on, there were several long stretches where we captured excellent video but the audio was completely missing. This meant we had to go back and figure out what went wrong with the microphone (troubleshooting this was much more difficult than you might think) and then re-shoot some of the steps. This turned out to have a silver lining, though, because the second time through I was substantially less inept than my initial attempts. Still inept, that is, but less so.
All in all, this was a really cool project, an awesome rocket build, and a successful video shoot. As soon as we’re done with the editing and have a final product, SBR will share the video on its YouTube channel (and I’ll share it as well, on my channel). In the meantime, if you’re looking to embark on your L3 certification, I highly recommend that you consider this L3 Fusion rocket!
Improbable Ventures 
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