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Old 05-09-2014, 06:06 AM
mojo1986's Avatar
mojo1986 mojo1986 is offline
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Default Early Rocket Motors

When I was a kid I used to try to make my own rocket motors. Anything that would lift its own weight was considered a success. Initial attempts were with match heads wrapped in bits of foil, pointy at one closed end and with a small opening at the other. These were fired by holding the flame of a match close enough to ignite the match heads inside. A good launch travelled several feet, with direction being completely arbitrary.

I next moved on to fire crackers. As you all know, these were composed of a paper tube in which a charge of black powder was centred between a clay plug at the bottom end and a fuse running through some clay at the top end. I used to roll the fire cracker in my fingers while squeezing the bottom clay plug. The clay would crumble and fall out, and as soon as I saw the first trace of black powder I would carefully pull the fuse from the other end and insert it in the opening formed at the bottom (I would double over a small section of the fuse so that it would stay put). Lighting these and firing out of a tube of some sort would give impressive flights of as much as 50 feet. Directional control was a big improvement over the match head rockets, but the flight path was usually some sort of a curve.

I then got the idea of gluing 3 of these together, not only for more power, but because it was easy to glue small fins cut from a toothpaste box into the joints between the motors. I twisted the fuses together and launched these from a small paper tube made expressly for the purpose. I remember my best flight, launched at a 45 degree angle, travelled in a straight line across the width of two back yards, so about 100 feet.

I built larger clusters, up to about a dozen, but never tried launching these because they were as thick as they were long. So I removed a set of wheels from one of the cars on my electric train set, put some straight track together, tied the larger motor clusters on and conducted rocket sled experiments down in the basement. Great fun! And ohhhh........the smell of the blue smoke down in the basement was a bonus!

Any similar stories out there?

Joe
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Old 05-09-2014, 09:19 AM
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Earl Earl is offline
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I did the match heads in foil trick a number of times and a variety of other materials and 'propellants' over the years including some very crude attempts with liquid propellants. Most of this was at a pretty young age 8-12, so not much of it at that time was too very sophisticated.

I did think I was getting into the big time when I did my first electrical ignition off the family car battery at about age 11 or so of a small hollow pointed metal tube I found and was able to fill with gun powder taken from a couple of high powered rifle cartridges. I made a small little pad to launch it from off the driveway and had about 6 feet of wire leads running from the battery down to the rocket. I touched the other wire to the other terminal and off it went with a whoosh. Didn't go really high but I found it in the front yard off from the driveway, but remember being happy that the electrical ignition worked.

Earl
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Old 05-09-2014, 09:48 AM
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JohnNGA JohnNGA is offline
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I also made the match/ foil rockets, once opened a shotgun shell and put the powder in a small piece of copper water pipe...Homer Hickam's first rocket comes to mind. In 67/68 met some guys tinkering with micrograin, that was interesting.
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