It’s been eight or ten months since the bottom part of my Saturn V crashed. The parachute for the bottom part was not ejected at deployment. In the ensuing crash, one fin was broken, the forward part of the tube and its attached wrap and tunnel cover (half-dowel) were damaged, the tube was kinked down to the next wrap, the forward portion of the motor mount tube was crushed, and the forward centering ring was damaged. Since then, I’ve been contemplating the repairs (and procrastinating about them, too).

It’s time to start repairing.

I’ve made lots of scratch-flown rockets. I never write down the build instructions in advance, nor even while working on the rocket. Occasionally, if I work out a particularly difficult or tricky section of the build, I might jot down a quick note or two, but never anything extensive. For the Saturn repair, I realized, finally, that it was complicated enough to warrant a) working through the details ahead of time, and b) writing the sequence and, in most cases, the detailed steps down. When I first determined a rough approach to the repair I conceptualized the steps as something like this:

1. Remove the damaged parts.
2. Repair the MMT and forward centering ring.
3. Replace the damaged body tube.
4. Replace the damaged wrap.
5. Paint.

I’m now up to about thirty steps, not five.  Some of those thirty steps have some sub-steps. It’s a complicated repair, and I think it’s worth getting it right.