Beach Shoot #16 - 19 mm Stinger with Titanium Streamer Stars
Date: 2003-12-16
Description
Standard 64 mm long, 19 mm ID stinger missile motor with BP meal propellant.
Delay section of KP organic blue colour composition. Off-centre 2.5 mm passfire hole in wax treated clay bulkhead.
Garnature of several 8 mm pumped Titanium Streamer stars in a head extension tube with a break charge of -20+40 mesh BP pulverone, 3 teaspoons.
Fused with blackmatch and meal-NC priming paste.
Shot from a large bamboo skewer stuck into the sand.
Comments
Worked OK!
It looks pretty good on the video, but the stinger motor had serious issues. As a result it only reached about 100 metres, and activated its payload at about 80 metres, maybe less.
You can see the blue colour of the delay composition burning as it continues up past the break of Titanium stars, reaches apogee, then falls. Clearly the delay simply didn't work, I may have drilled too far into it with the passfire hole.
The nozzle end of the motor also had serious problems. It wasn't rammed very well, as I was cautious of making too much noise at the hour the device was assembled. I also must have screwed up marking the thickness of the nozzle clay, as a result I drilled the spin vent partially into the clay and the nozzle crumbled slightly. I tried to repair it, but there wasn't much I could do.
Amazing that the motor didn't cato or take off in some odd direction. It actually performed very well considering through most of its flight it was actually missing about 1/3 rd of the nozzle and the spin vent was growing to over 8 mm ID!
This is the first 19 mm stinger I've recovered, but its poor construction means it didn't yield very much information.
The break was OK, could have been fuller perhaps, the end disk of the header extension blew out rather than the walls failing, this is to be expected with this simplistic header design. A spiked canister would provide a better break.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 1.058 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 44.484 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture #1 | image/jpeg | 59.540 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture #2 | image/jpeg | 46.310 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture #3 | image/jpeg | 38.109 kbytes |