Beach Shoot #12 - Half-Tourbillion
Date: 2003-11-21
Description
Built as an experiment.
12.5 mm ID tube of PVA pasted frozen meal cardboard, A4 80 gsm overwrap. Straight meal propellant, rammed hard. End plugs of wax treated cat litter. Spin and lift vent drilled with 2.5 mm drill.
Lift vent fused with quickmatch leader from spin vent. Short section of bare match to implement delay before lift ignition. Spin vent fused with blackmatch and meal-NC in the usual manner.
Glued together paddle-pop sticks as the stabilizer wing.
Comments
Spectacular failure.
It spun up OK, but shortly after the lift vent was activated the stabilizer wings were wrenched off, and the thing started to flop around uselessly on the ground.
Not long after there was an *enormous* report, the side wall of the tube failed. I would imagine it happened as the two burning surfaces from each vent broke down the propellant plug between them, resulting in a large burn surface area and excessive internal pressure.
It wasn't well enough balanced and was too heavy to work, the wings came off too easily, and the case failed to withstand the normal bulk-burn effect of a tourbillion at the end of its flight.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.257 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 78.917 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 72.535 kbytes |