Four 1/4" rockets, made mainly for fun/practice rather than development of new propellants or header techniques.
Three motors were basically identical, rammed on Rich Wolter's tooling and charged with the ye olde contaminated batch of meal and left without a clay bulkhead to facilitate passing fire to their payloads. The forth was charged with meal to just beyond the core, then the remaining space charged with variegated streamer and the top capped off with a clay bulkhead.
One payload was a Magnalium Flash broken 3/8" Tiger Tail crossette, one a pair of 3/8" D1 stars, and one carried a small 5 mm ID benzoate whistle insert that I had made a while ago for a mine.
Standard stick and blackmatch fuse, payloads attached with pasted kitchen paper.
Mostly malfunctioned.
The motors all worked well, but the payloads had issues.
The benzoate whistle was very quiet, it was quite old stock and being benzoate based this wasn't too suprising. At least this rocket more or less functioned correctly.
The D1 and crossette headed rockets both blew their payload blind. I am unsure why, they both had blackmatch passfires which can be seen/heard to fire. Perhaps there was some driven-in moisture in the header from the pasting job?
The variegated streamer rocket didn't gain enough height and burnt to the ground, but it did make a nice effect. The tail was quite beautiful. The streamer composition is a bit slow to be used in such a large quantity in the motor, about half the amount would have been ideal.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Benzoate Whistle Payload Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.371 Mbytes |
| Crossette Payload Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.171 Mbytes |
| D1 Payload Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.540 Mbytes |
| Variegated Streamer Delay Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.804 Mbytes |