Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project
Rotational Alignment (of Atomic City Mercury Kit)
From RixWiki
One of the tricky things to watch in building this kit correctly is the rotational alignment of the parts. In most cases there are keys but sometimes they are subtle, and not always called out in the intructions. In talking about this, I'm going to use terms like top, bottom, left, front, and back. These are from the perspective of the astronaut sitting in the capsule, so top is the side of the capsule by his head, and right is the side of the capsule by his right side. The astronauts window is on the top, the hatch is roughly on the right. (see also Mercury spacecraft coordinate orientation
- The conical section has a key on the inside at the top (in line with the astronaut's window) There are slots in both the rear cabin wall and in the inner ring on the inside of the heatshield.
- The placement of the parts within the recovery section (the cylindrical section of the capsule) is easy to get wrong. There are five ribs inside the recovery section, two sets of paired ribs which locate the part which splits the recovery section into two aproximate halves, and a slightly longer rib which keys into a subtle slot in the narrow end of the truncated cone of the main capsule body. Before placing the two parts inside the recovery compartment make sure you understand where the top of the recovery compartment is. The right side of recovery compartment contained two parachutes (a main and a reserve) which were above and below each other. The triangular piece in the kit which goes at right angles to the dividing wall covers equipment on the left side of the compartment. The parachutes are not provided in the kit, but the open side of the recovery compartment after the parachutes were gone was also the egress path for the astronaut if he didn't want to go through the hatch. The only astronaut who actually used this path was Scott Carpenter on the MA-7 mission after he overshot his planned landing area and had to wait out the recovery team. He did this rather than blowing the hatch, something he was no doubt loath to do after the MR-4 mission.
- Probably the trickiest part of the whole kit is Building the Escape Tower
