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system. I found a nose cone that was fairly short at Mad Cow rocketry. I figured that if I cut off the bottom of the nose cone and bonded in a bulkplate a few inches from the top, that would get me a bunch of real estate for all of the recovery components. With a rough plan on what to do, it was time to tackle the hard part: how to make a ring that would be tough enough for flight. It is funny how when you work in a cut- ting-edge environment such as aerospace, you learn what can be done with various materials. Aer a few experiments with birch plywood, polycarbonate, and G10 fi- berglass, I thought the fiberglass would be the best choice. I was not concerned about heat forming or anything fancy like that. I would just bend it around and restrain it to get the shape that I was aer (Figure 3). e fins were machined out of .062" thick G10 with a small groove in them that was a snug fit for two thicknesses of the .031" thick G10 that would make up the ring-tail (Figure 4). e ring was divided into three equal size flat segments of G10 material. e fins were cut out to the cor- rect shape, upscaled from an old catalog image. I bonded the fins to the airframe/ motor mount in a through-the-wall con- struction (Figure 5). Expanding foam was used to encapsulate the fin roots in the air- frame. Now came the fun part. I bonded the ring segments into the fin slots, project- ing out at right angles to the fins (Figure SPORT ROCKETRY MAY/JUNE 2022 29 Figure 2. RockSim drawing of 4" upscaled Sprite. Search for the National Association of Rocketry and subscribe today. vNARCON-2022 Presentations are Available on YouTube. 6). e final ring geometry would finish more circular in shape if I started with the segments square to the fins. Feeler gauges were used to push the ring segments out- ward in the slots (Figure 7). e gap was there in order to later fit the opposite end of the ring segment into the adjacent fin slot as a lap joint with a small 1/4" amount of overlap. e peculiar looking bonded as- sembly was allowed to cure.