Beach Shoot #17 - Flying Hummer
Date: 2003-12-19
Description
Another Z-bomb like device.
Built exactly like the last device of the same type, a 12.5 mm ID hummer tube, 25 mm long. Wax treated cat litter end plugs, meal propellant. 1.8 mm vent hole, drilled tangentally and upwards at 45 degrees to meet the propellant grain in the center.
Fused with thin blackmatch and meal-NC paste priming.
Comments
Worked great!
Soared up 50 metres or more before burn-out. Unfortunately it was too fast to follow this time. Once again it gave a final puff of sparks after a short delay, probably due to slivers of propellant in the corners of the grain breaking loose from the walls due to the high rotational rate.
The device spun up to about 495 Hz, or 29.7 kRPM.
It was not recovered unfortunately.
In the pre-test picture you can see the case extender used to help fully fill the case. It is probably the most important piece of tooling used in constructing these devices, making that last scoup of propellant and clay *much* easier to ram.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 504.930 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 44.341 kbytes |
| Spectrogram | image/gif | 169.009 kbytes |