At the start of the year I purchased two Binder Design kits - the Excel 38mm and the Spike. Over the last couple of months I have been working on the Spike and am very happy with the end result!

Standing 30" tall (76cm) doesn't make it the biggest in my fleet (that honor goes to the Estes Mean Machine at 6.5" tall!) but I think it's one of the best kits I have put together to date.

The kit comes with a plastic nose cone, ply centering rings, heavy-duty cardboard body tube and motor mount, very nice high-quality plywood fins, rail buttons, tubular nylon shock cord, 18" parachute and detailed step-by-step instructions.

After running the design through rocsim, I added a couple of gramms of weight to the nose (there's a note on the front page of the instructions about this) for stability. I deviated only once from the instructions with regard to building the fins. Instructions call for mounting the two centering rings and then glueing in the fins - I didn't glue in the rear centering ring, allowing me to apply internal fillets to the through-wall fins - I believe that this will make for a more robust rocket.

I also made the decision not to use the rail buttons, instead using a 1/4" rod lug.

I can't wait to fly it!