Brief:
1.59X upscale of one of the original Estes Goonybirds, the Super Sky Shriek is for the most part an E-powered Estes Fat Boy with cool fins and an even cooler paint scheme.

Construction:
The parts list:

• BT-80 main body tube 8.0"
• Estes PNC-80BB nose cone
• 2 centering rings
• 48" Kevlar shock cord
• 48" sewing elastic shock cord (1/8")

Technically there were no instructions for the SSS, but part of the beauty of the rocket was that none were really needed. I built the engine mount using some centering rings scrounged from an Estes Patriot kit that long ago became something else, a length of BT-50 for the motor tube, and an E motor hook and engine block. Once this had dried I tied a length of Kevlar between the two centering rings, cut a slot in the tip of the upper ring, slathered the whole thing with wood glue and mounted it in the body tube. The fin guide from the original Sky Shriek upscaled a little small, but I compensated for the error and attached the fins with LocTite gel CA and wood glue fillets. I made another mistake here that I didn't catch until I was in the hotel room on Friday night. I forgot the three strakes between each pair of fins...and the launch lug but that's nothing new. Luckily I had brought building materials with me including balsa and launch lugs so I was able to cut three lengths of balsa and prime them before going to bed. At the field the next day I painted the strakes and the launch lug on the new table that I bought at Wal-Mart then attached them with epoxy. An hour later it was flight worthy.

Finishing:
Being that it is a two-color paint scheme, the Super Sky Shriek should be an easy rocket to paint. It is, but there are masking and placement issues that can be a pain. Having already replicated the paint scheme in a 1:1 clone, I thought I'd have no trouble with it's big brother. I thought wrong and I have no one to blame but myself.

I printed out two versions of the mask for the paint scheme, one at 158%, the other at 159%. I should have gone with one at 160% because that seems to be the one that would have worked best on the copier I used. The 158% upscale was far too small and the 159% was also iffy, but since I had already left work for my NSL vacation and was leaving the next morning, I was stuck with it. I had previously sprayed the whole top 2/3 of the rocket with Valspar Cherry Red gloss, but as I sometimes do, I forgot to put on the launch lug. This is critical because the launch lug is a major landmark for correctly placing the mask. My rocket had no launch lug, and since this didn't register at the time, I just stuck the mask on and sprayed the unmasked area with Valspar gloss black. It was later when I was peeling the mask off that I realized what I had done. The damage wasn't terminal to either the rocket or the paint job, but the launch lug lines up a lot closer to one of the fins than I'd normally be comfortable with, and this in turn makes decal placement a lot more difficult. I had printed the upscaled sticker decal onto a large piece of label paper and carefully cut it out. I tried a few trial stickings to see exactly where I could apply it without the red or black paint showing in a spot where it shouldn't have. It turned out that my upscale of the sticker had been correct, however barely. The finished product looks great, especially with the "goo-goo-googly" eyes that my daughter picked out.

Flight:
The Super Sky Shriek was one of several first flight rockets that I took with me to NSL 2007. While it wasn't my first flight on Saturday (as I still had some work to do on the strakes), it was definitely the one I looked forward to the most. I had built it with the Estes E9-6 in mind and it sat on the pad next to Mark Bundick's Astron Sprite upscale. (Being on the pad next to the NAR president caused me to wonder if the Sky Shriek had undergone a more stringent inspection by the RSO in case any revolutionaries had secreted themselves inside with ideas of doing harm to Bunny's Sprite. Sort of a Trojan Rocket?)

While being on the pad next to the president is a high-visibility, high-pressure spot on the bill, the big Goony was up to the task. The E has become one of my favorite motors and this flight was as graphic a depiction of why that I could come up with. Liftoff was slow enough for me to easily capture a launch shot, but it left the pad with authority. I have no way of figuring how high it went, but it was plenty high for me, even on a field as large as AMA. The big fins caused it to windcock slightly but nowhere near as much as I thought it might. Ejection seemed to come just as the rocket lost its forward momentum and recovery was just out past the high power pads. Easily my favorite flight of NSL.

Flights two and three were both on E9-6s at a recent Quark section launch. While they were similar to the NSL flight in every way, they did do something a little different. Both flights had a whistle after motor burnout that was clearly audible from the ground. I didn't notice this at NSL, but the crowd was larger and noisier. It's also possible that it didn't whistle at NSL and did at VOA because I replaced one of the strakes that sit between the fins. I'm not sure which it is, but the whistle lends a whole new meaning to the name "Sky Shriek".

Recovery:
As usual, the recovery team consisted of too much Kevlar (four feet or so), too much 1/4" sewing elastic (ditto four feet), and a nylon chute that seems to get swapped out between a lot of my E-powered birds. To date, all have performed admirably, although I wish I could find that blanket of Perma-Wadding that disappeared during the move a couple of years ago.

Summary:
PROs: Great looking design despite the tongue in cheek intentions of the original Goonies. Upscales nicely in both size and power with a minimum of muss and fuss. Someone actually thought this was a design I came up with and wondered if it was fit for family launches. Whistles during the coast phase. Does anyone know if the original did this?

CONs: What could you say bad about a flying tongue?