Tell Me About These...
 

While looking for rocketry products on Amazon today, I ran across these:

http://www.amazon.com/Generic-Elect...l/dp/B00J4C0028

Generic e-matches, for those not wanting to follow the link.

My question is... has anyone here tried these? I used up my stock of Q2G2's on Sunday, and I'm interested in anything that will give me reliable ignition of my 4x18 Big Daddy as well as the several 2 and 3 cluster 18mm rockets in my fleet.

In the question and answer section, the seller states that they are to big for the Estes engines, like the B6-4. Doesn't say anything about 24mm or 29mm motors. I guess no one asked.

High-power folks use these for electronic ignition of ejection charges. Dual deploy.

I bought a bunch for this purpose.

I haven't tried them in larger BP or in composite motors yet.

I wondered about these..... CTI "igniters" are generally e-matches of some sort, selected for the particular motor. But CTI puts a pellet of BP in the base of the delay grain to work with the ematch. I would think in Aerotech motors they might need to be dipped in pyrogen (though this is purely speculation on my part as the only homemade igniters I've made were via the Quickburst kits and they have a fine nichrome bridge wire one has to wrap).

No idea why one would want to use an e-match for larger BP motors unless it was some kind of special air-start staging or something.

It's not the size of the igniter, it's the length of the leads. Don't need clip whips etc. if you have long leads, and insulated leads are the best.

They LOOK a lot like Q2G2 igniters, actually... I just couldn't tell how big they actually were. I hadn't noticed the comment that they don't fit Estes 18mm engines.

Oh, well. Would have been nice... price is unbeatable.

Hmm, eRockets and BuyRocketMotors have Q2G2 packs in stock.

$8.99 for a 6 pack of the 3" Q2G2s at both sites, and on BuyRocketMotors.com they limit you to 2 packs per order. The product I linked above is a 100 pack for $16.40... under $0.02 each vs. $1.50 each. If they worked, I'd buy a pile of them, no question.

A great alternative to wimpy commercial igniters is to make your own.

I've built my own using small (26ga.) twinlead and Firefox Enterprises Liquid Element (SECPLEL), a conductive pyrogen. I have also used CAT5 LAN cable -- just cut it open and use one of the twisted pairs.

With the conductive Liquid Element, no bridge wire required. For black powder, Liquid Element alone works great. If the dipped area is kept pretty small (like the Quest Q2G2), these will easily fit into BP motors.

For composites, a second dip in something like their Magnum Secondary Pyrogen (SECPMAG), gives a longer burn time and bigger spark. This technique for composites can yield very compact igniter "heads", and fit small motors like the 24/40 and 29/40-120 hardware quite easily.

Here is the link to the "Ignition" page on Firefox website:
http://www.firefox-fx.com/ignition.htm

The website is a bit hard to find what you are looking for, but the above items are maybe 1/2 way down the "Ignition" page.

It is possible that one of these ematches might, if taped pointing upwards into the nozzle of a 18mm bp motor, result in ignition. I haven't tried. I might give it a go; next opportunity will be 10/3.

My primary interest is igniting clusters. I have enough Estes igniters (not starters) for my needs for a very long time. I just don't like lighting a 4 cluster with those.