A simple 12.5 mm ID, 25 mm long hummer tube. Wax treated cat litter end plugs, pressed with KP Silver Driver composition:
8 Potassium Perchlorate
2 Red Gum
2 Aluminium (-325 mesh, spherical)
1 Aluminium (fine flitters)
This composition takes fire from blackmatch fairly relibably, so it was fused simply with thin blackmatch and meal-NC paste priming. Spin vent was drilled out with a 1.8 mm drill, the placement was somewhat sub-optimal compared to previous hummer style devices (I screwed up with the drill).
Spun up eventually.
The weather has been horrible, so more interesting devices are waiting for an break to be tested. This was just something to test the composition for driver and star potentional.
Nice bright Aluminium firefly effects from the fine flitters. Most the finer Aluminium was being consumed internally or burning cool in the exhaust plume. Flake is really needed for best performance, but I do not have any.
The thrust and brightness was nothing to write home about, I made cut stars with the rest of the composition batch, they seem to work pretty well, needing minimal priming, just a layer of meal.
The hole enlarged a lot during the burn, not uncommon with metal rich hot-burning compositions, far worse than normal meal/Ti hummers though. This may prove a problem in use as an end-burning driver.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 1.887 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 27.680 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 44.679 kbytes |