The Idea and the Plan
Entry posted by nater
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One of the reasons I started building fireworks was because it is difficult to get a good commercial rocket. One of my old favorite consumer rockets was Phantom’s Blue Streak Rocket. If you don’t remember it, it had a charcoal tail and a hard broken header with blue stars and silver fish. Since then, this little rocket has suffered the fate as many others and has been toned down to where it is barely recognizable as the same piece. I want to make my own, but I might as well make it bigger, right?
I’m going to stray from the original design and use a ¾” motor with a cylinder shell heading. I want to rocket to take off right at launch rather than have the slow graceful climb of a traditional BP motor. The 2 motors I am considering for this project are Steve LaDuke’s Hybrid BP motor and Dan Thames’ “HP-140-4C” fuel pressed on ¾” U/H Tooling. For an added effect to the tail, I will add a blue comet to the heading. At the onset of this project I am planning on using ⅜” Majdali Purple pumped stars or Gary Smith’s Blue Parlon sliced stars for the color break. It crossed my mind to use silver fish fuse cut into 1” strips mixed in loose with the burst, but now I’m thinking about making titanium streamer go-getters or titanium serpents as inserts instead of using bits of fuse. If I didn’t include a report at the end of the effects, I think I would get kicked out of HPAA, so I will use a small report on the outside of the motor like the stick-busting salutes people are now using on bigger rockets.
If most of you had the idea to build a rocket with a blue peony and silver fish shell, you could probably have it assembled in no time at all. I am quite the new-comer to the scene, and have not yet built most of the tools and compositions I will need to fulfill my idea. At the time of this writing, I have had a successful flight with a ¾” BP motor, I have had more rockets fail to fly, make round trips, and CATO on the rack. On these failures, I’ve made a few simple headers which all seemed to work as expected. I have chosen the formulas mentioned above because aside from the whistle fuel, I have the necessary chems. I have built a set of screens and use a tumbler from Harbor Freight as a small ball mill. I also have a couple of small star pumps. I do not have a press, so I have rammed all of my motors. So, I will have to build a press, dial in motors, make and test stars, make and test go-getters, and make and test cylinder shell designs with the appropriate burst charge before putting it all together in my kicked up Blue Streak Rocket. Wow, I’m going to be busy - and probably flooding the lists with questions along the way.
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