Balcony Shoot #29 - Titanium End-Burning Rocket
Date: 2003-11-15
Description
Standard 9.5 mm ID tube, 50 mm long. Wax treated cat litter nozzle and bulkhead, 2.5 mm off-centre passfire hole and nozzle. Very short core, only 3 mm into propellant.
The propellant was 10% spherical Titanium added to blackpowder meal. The same as that used in the Titanium hummers and stingers.
Motor was fused with Zn effects blackmatch glued in place with meal-NC paste. Standard kebab stick stabilizer, hot-melt glued to case.
Head effect of three soda straw 'insert reports' each with a different length fuse. They were pressed into a thin paper tube to contain them. The top sealed with hot-melt. The recess in the top of the motor casing was filled with a small amount of -20+40 mesh pulverone as a seperation charge. Finally the heading was taped to the top of the motor with masking tape, the meal-NC paste primed fuses of the three reports plunging into the pulverone.
Comments
Rocket worked OK.
Fairly gentle acceleration, crackling Titanium effect tail.
Probably reached 30-50 metres apogee.
The payload did activate, the ejection charge blowing the report assembly off the top of the motor casing. It is hard to see because of the brightness of the tail swamping the camera. I am not 100% sure why the reports didn't fire, it is unlikely their time fuses failed, more likely the tube containing them prevent them from exploding with a report, they 'jetted' instead. Some evidence for this could be seen by eye, as the payload assembly tumbled and appeared to be self-propelled.
This was a test flight for the propellant in this motor configuration, the header was added as an after thought to indicate apogee. The propellant has flown before on the short core-burning 19 mm stingers with good success.
Better performance can be achieved, the core could probably be a lot longer in future motors but some experimentation is likely required.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 836.204 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 45.215 kbytes |
| Insert Reports | image/jpeg | 28.946 kbytes |