Beach Shoot #16 - 6-Shot Micro-Cake
Date: 2003-12-16
Description
Hexagonal configuration of 9.5 mm ID, 50 mm long mortars, plugged a the bottom with wadding and hot-melt glue. The tubes originally rubber-band held around a 7th central tube while hot-melt glued together. The 7th tube was removed and some glue and wadding put in the middle after a chipboard base and bamboo spike was added. A 1.8 mm fuse hole was drilled just above the bottom plug in each tube.
A short piece of thin blackmatch was placed into each hole and the lift added. Followed by an experimetal KP/Zinc star and a small piece of wadding. Finally meal-NC paste was used to connect an additional length of blackmatch between each tube, the free end of which acted as the device fuse. A small piece of masking tape covered each primed passfire hole and main fuse connection.
I used the clay measuring spoon from my 9.5 mm ID rocket tooling to measure the lift for each tube, the amount used in previous stargun tests with mortars of this size.
Comments
Kinda worked.
I was somewhat concerned all the bare blackmatch and meal-NC priming would mean the mortars would chain-fire. Which indeed they did, although only three closely spaced lifts are heard all six tubes fired and four stars can be seen in the video.
The big question is what happened to the other two stars? I can only assume they were blown blind or lost in the tail of the other stars. This was the last of the unprimed batch of KP/Zinc stars so a retest with primed stars is in order.
I need to come up with a better matching scheme for future attempts. The tubes cleaned up well, and can be used at least once more, if not many times again. Slightly more lift would be required to prevent drooping before burn-out.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 969.796 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 55.507 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 58.382 kbytes |