Remove those paper towel lines on your model rocket kit.

A simple yet economical trick you can easily do to remove those spiral lines on your rocket body tubes.
First, before you assemble your rocket, try using an inexpensive wood filler and smear it into the groves on the tubing.
Second, after it completely dries, lightly sand with a fine grit grade sandpaper.
Third, prime it with a sandable primer. Re-sanding only if necessary.
Then you can continue to construct your rocket. Then paint.
You may not remove every single line from the kit, but it will give it a more "authentic" or "realistic" apperance especially if it's a scale replica of a large NASA or military type rocket.
Also, you may want to try (after painting and decals) spray your kit with a matte spray. ( I use Krylon myself).
This will not only give it a flatter type finish, but it will also conceal any shiny globs of plastic cement that you may have overlooked earlier.

Hope this helps,
Mercury Redstone

Having stability problems with your "scratch-built model rocket"?

First, let's do a stability check. Take your rocket get it ready for flight, i.e. insert the motor, chute ect..Then get a ruler and lay the rocket at the place where it will balance. That is your center of gravity (GC). Then mark it with a pencil.

Next, get a six foot string and tie it at the mark. Be sure to tape it there as well so it won't slide. Take hold of the other end of the string and swing it over your head in a circle. Your rocket should fly straight and level.
If it wobbles or tumbles, you have an unstable rocket and will wildly fly during flight. This means your CG is to low on the rocket.

To compensate for this, try inserting modeling clay in the nosecone. Then swing it around again. Add small amounts of clay and keep testing until it flys straight and level.
Hope this helps.

Mercury Redstone 1

Launch of Freedom 7, the first American manned
suborbital space flight. Astronaut Alan Shepard
aboard, the Mercury-Redstone (MR-3) rocket is
launched from Pad 5.

The model rocket, and perhaps more importantly, the model rocket motor, were both designed in 1954 by Orville Carlisle, a licensed pyrotechnics expert, and his brother Robert, a model airplane builder. They originally designed the engine and rocket for Robert to use in lectures on the principles of rocket powered flight. But then Orville read articles written in Popular Mechanics by G. Harry Stine about the safety problems associated with young people trying to make their own rocket engines.

During the late 1950's, many people, excited about the idea of space travel, tried to design and build their own flying rockets, just as decades earlier people thought of designing and building their own models of the new airplanes that were taking to the skies. Unfortunately, designing and building a working rocket was not as simple or safe as building a model airplane. Most tried to build their models entirely out of metal parts, and mixed dangerous chemicals to make motors. The results were disastrous. Most of these rockets blew up like bombs, injuring and killing their builders and spectators. Some began to call for making the activity illegal, or at least restricting the availability of the chemicals used.

Orville realized that his designs could solve these problems and sent samples of his rockets and motors to Mr. Stine in January 1957. Stine, a range safety officer at White Sands Missile range, built and flew the models, and then devised a safety code for the activity based on his experience at the range. That humble beginning was the start of model rocketry as we know it today.

Courtesy of the NAR

The invention of the rocket is generally ascribed to the Chinese, who as early as A.D. 1000 stuffed gunpowder into sections of bamboo tubing to make effective weapons.

The astronautical use of rockets was cogently argued in the early 20th cent. by the Russian Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky; the American Robert H. Goddard, who launched the first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926; and the German Hermann Oberth.

During World War II, a German team under Wernher Von Braun developed the V-2 rocket, the first long-range guided missile. After the war, rocket research in the U.S. and the USSR (now Russia) intensified, leading to the development of the modern array of intercontinental ballistic missiles and spacecraft-launching rockets.

Gemini-Titan 4 (GT-4) lift-off carrying James McDivitt and Ed White for a four-day mission. This flight included the first spacewalk by an American astronaut,performed by Ed White.