Newbie Looking for Help

[Vildez]

Hello everyone my name is Tim.

 

I just signed up for the forum today and thought I would introduce myself. My main reason for being here is that my children got an opportunity to launch some model rockets with some friends and are now asking me to get them everything they need to start the hobby. Unfortunately, my family is low income and can't afford to do so. That being said I showed them some videos on bottle rockets and they were just as amazed and are super excited about getting going on this project.

 

I have been speaking with Dag who has generously decided to help me out with some tooling and recommended that I post on the forums to see if anyone is willing to donate any left over supplies that may be useful in making these little bottle rockets. Also, if you don't have anything you can donate but you are willing to sell some stuff at a much cheaper rate then I would normally find it at please let me know as that would also be very helpful.

 

Most importantly is advise. If anyone would be willing to give me some tips and pointers on making 1/2" bottle rockets that would be great!! To save money I am going to be wanting to roll my own tubes make my own fuses etc etc.. So if there is any trusted sources out there that you know of that can teach me these methods please feel free to share them.

 

Thank you all and I look forward to meeting everyone and getting myself and children into a really fun hobby!!!

 

Thanks Again,

 

Tim.

[patsroom]

Tim

Welcome to the forum I hope you are able to find all the support you need here. Flying model rockets is fun and sharing this hobby with your children makes it even better. For about 10 to 15 dollars you can make a lot of 5 cent rockets. You can roll the motor tubes from newspaper around a 1/4" wooden dowel. Make a small jig to center the motor on make the nozzle (cat litter) and fill the motor with a sugar base fuel. Plug the end with cat litter. make a launch controller on the cheap with some old Christmas lights and finger nail polish make igniters. To boost the power of the fuel add a little red rust. I have used copy paper to make the rocket bodies and printer designed on the paper to make petty as well as little rockets. I hope this is some help. Be safe and have fun..............Pat

[Vildez]

Tim

Welcome to the forum I hope you are able to find all the support you need here. Flying model rockets is fun and sharing this hobby with your children makes it even better. For about 10 to 15 dollars you can make a lot of 5 cent rockets. You can roll the motor tubes from newspaper around a 1/4" wooden dowel. Make a small jig to center the motor on make the nozzle (cat litter) and fill the motor with a sugar base fuel. Plug the end with cat litter. make a launch controller on the cheap with some old Christmas lights and finger nail polish make igniters. To boost the power of the fuel add a little red rust. I have used copy paper to make the rocket bodies and printer designed on the paper to make petty as well as little rockets. I hope this is some help. Be safe and have fun..............Pat

 

Pat,

 

Thank you so much for the reply. Can you elaborate a little more on the jig / fuel and what / how you can make a launch controller? Possibly some video links etc would be very helpful. You also mentioned red dust is this red iron oxide if so where can you locally obtain something of the sort?

[patsroom]

Hi Tim,

I used a 1/4" wooden dowel to make the ramrod of about 4" long with a hold drilled about 1 and 3/4 inches deep. another rod 4" long with one layer of clear tape from the same dowel to forum the paper tubes on. The paper tubes I made at first were about 2" long with a 1/4" ID glued with white glue. Tubes about 2 1/4" would work for a delay a rejection charge. The jig I used to ram the fuel on was made with a 2" finishing nail in the middle of a 1/4"x1"x3" wood stick. The walls of the tubes were about a 1/16" thick which seem fine for me but ymmv so watch that as you work thing out.

The fuel:

SALTPETER...........................63%
SUGAR...............................27%
SULFUR..............................10%

with a pinch of iron rust (red iron oxide) helps a lot. I found all of this information on the web at The Incredible FIive Cent Sugar Rocket sites and they can give you even more information.

As for the launch controller a 9 volt battery and a switch set into a box. wire running about 20 feet two gator clamps at the end. I have used the little Christmas lights with a little nail polish and a small piece of toilet paper just a little bit of powder fuel on it in the nozzle to light the rocket motor. Look into Christmas light igniters here on the forum. And iron oxide rusted iron (nails) does work wonders to the fuel.

[BlueComet24]

Welcome to APC, Tim. I'm always glad to have another rocketry person on this forum.

I've been making small black powder rockets for a while now, and have recently been successful in making 1/2" (12.7mm) motors that have a similar design to Estes rocket motors. I haven't made many sugar rockets, but I plan to soon and I've cooked plenty of rocket candy, so hopefully I can be of help to you.

You may have heard about the two main configurations of rocket motors; endburner and coreburner. As you can see from the diagrams, coreburners have more surface area of burning fuel but burn away quicker, while endburners have less fuel burning at once and burn longer. Thus coreburners are good at lifting heavy things (such as shells) a few hundred feet up, while endburners are better suited to lifting lighter payloads very high (maybe 1000+ ft).

Estes motors are endburners, but I think they have a short (1/4" or so) core which gives them some higher initial thrust, which helps them get unstuck from the launch pad and keep them pointed upward. Here is a page about making model rocket motors with black powder, factory-made tubes, and machined tooling. You can do the same with sugar fuel, tubes rolled from brown paper grocery bags and wheat paste or white glue, and tooling made from dowels and a brass nail/rod. It sounds like you've already got tooling covered thanks to Dag's generosity, so you won't have to make your own. Here's a video by Viking on how to roll tubes. Make sure you don't put glue on the part of the paper that touches the dowel, otherwise the tubes won't come off. The tubes will need to dry before use. Here's a handy calculator for how long of a strip of paper to use to make the walls of a tube a certain thickness. I assume that printer paper is about 0.1mm thick and brown grocery bag (kraft) paper is 0.2mm. The standard for tube wall thickness is 1/4 the inner diameter of the tube, so a 1/2" tube would have walls 1/8" thick, meaning its outside diameter is 3/4". If you enter these dimensions in the calculator (using 0.2mm paper, also it only accepts decimals) then it says you need 79.2cm or 31.2" of kraft paper.

For the nozzle and bulkhead you can use clay cat litter ground to a powder. The cheapest stuff you can find should work well (it's dirt cheap because it's clay... almost dirt!), and some people say Fresh Step scoopable is the best for nozzles. Don't wet the powder, just hammer it dry and it will compact and become solid. You can also melt around 10% paraffin wax into the powder before use.

If you want to make firework rockets, then you'll need sticks. I recommend finding some medium to large bamboo (if it's at least an inch in diameter it should be thick enough) and collect fallen stalks. Bamboo splits easily with a knife or hatchet, so an hour of splitting bamboo into sticks equally thick and wide can yield dozens of stabilizer sticks. For 1/2" motors, you'll want sticks that are about 1/4" thick and at least 2' long.

Please feel free to ask any questions you may have. Best of luck, and have fun and stay safe.

-BlueComet24

 

P.S. I just reviewed some of my notes and A, B, and C Estes motors (the ones that are 1/2" ID) are about 2.75" long, .695" OD, and have ~.125" nozzles. You'd need 52.1cm (20.5") strips of 0.2mm paper. You mentioned making bottle rockets, though, which (if they're coreburners) would use tubes 5" long. If you want to add effects to the rocket, you can make a huge variety of effects with just KNO3, charcoal, sulfur, and dextrin. If you don't have those other chemicals, and just KNO3, then you can still actually make stars out of rocket candy and they're pretty cool, especially at dusk. They will absorb water from the air though, as with most sugar-based compositions, so keep them stored air-tight.

Edited August 19, 2016 by BlueComet24

[x8quicksilver8x]

Good luck I'm starting out too

[RobL]

Hi Folks,

 

My name is Rob and I have just joined APC, my interests are mainly chemistry related but as U.K. law changed recently we have to be licenced for most of the important lab reagents and some of the most important pyro chemicals.

 

I had always stayed away from pyro but now the Law puts the same demands on pryo's and chemists I thought "what the hell, I might as well get into this as well"

 

So now I have most of the pyro chemicals!

 

For now I am using my chemical background to get by but will be moving on to better things as soon as I have the confidence. Lots of videos on firework construction out there!

 

Thanks.

[Arthur]

Tim

Welcome! The biggest cost you will have is location. If you have a suitable garden for a firing site that makes life easier, otherwise you may have to drive to a firing site.

 

A small but satisfying rocket may contain 5 grammes of compound larger ones up to 25g so the compound isn't the expensive bit.

 

Trying to learn everything -tube rolling to rocket design at the beginning may be hard, I'd suggest that you start with known good tubes and some commercial visco fuse and design the compound and the compound, size and shape of the charge. Once you have perfected that take on some more variables and design the tubes and the fusing.

Some coloured compounds will help to make a satisfying break at the top of the rocket flight.

[Mia]

Edited November 2, 2016 by Mia