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Originally Posted by Rocket Doctor
NO, NO, NO don't even try to clone motors, leave that up to the professionals, let's keep our hobby SAFE.
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...Which is why I included the provision about only using them if flying by oneself. Where I live, there are places I can fly rockets where there are no people or buildings anywhere within a 10 mile radius, and there are others who have such isolated launch sites.
While I'm not particularly interested in making sugar propellant A10-0T clones myself (sugar rocket motors are labor-intensive to make, even in batches of 20 or so, see:
http://balloons.space.edu/ndra/nickle.html ), small sugar motors aren't particularly dangerous to either make or use, although it takes some practice to get uniform impulse in a batch of the motors. They can be made as zero-delay booster motors or have time delays and ejection charges.
Although they are core burners (by necessity, as the sugar propellant has a rather low specific impulse), they can be electrically ignited just like black powder motors. A sugar A10-0T CATO is no worse than a black powder A10-0T CATO, except for the possible emotional impact of watching the extra "sweat equity" that the maker invested in producing the motor go up in smoke.
There is nothing wrong with informed and prudently cautious adults making small rocket motors, especially non-black powder ones such as sugar motors. After all, if Orville Carlisle had not experimented with making his own rocket motors (and black powder ones, at that!), would our hobby ever have come into being?