Saxon Stand Test - Reversing Saxon
Date: 2006-01-06
Description
I spent Friday afternoon making myself a Saxon/Wheel stand. It's been a bit of a while since I made spinning devices, I've been concentrating on rockets for over 6 months. Time to go back to smelling that kind of smoke!
To test my new stand a simple reversing 1/4" driver saxon was chosen. Pyrotube 1/4"x2" cases where charged with compositions I had a small quantity of in the magazine; RP and Fe Driver. The drivers were hot-melt glued and redundantly masking taped to a tounge depressor. Interdriver matching was implemented using a length of blackmatch and some masking tape to make the piping. Blackmatch was also used to fuse the Iron driver.
The resulting device being a somewhat ugly hack, I had little confidence in its performance. I was concerned that the interdriver matching wasn't protected from stay sparks well enough, but the piping mechanism was designed to be loose enough to ensure we did not repeat the violent pipe rupture of the last multidriver wheel that almost brought it to grief.
Comments
Actually worked pretty well.
The 1/4" drivers aren't much to write home about with the compositions used, but otherwise the device performed as designed.
The Iron was too fine, much like in this previous device, in fact it was the last dregs of that propellant. Sparkler steel would have been more effective, especially in a 1/2" driver.
The RP performed almost exactly as meal + 10% Aluminium did this previous saxon. It is a mysterous effect that I still don't fully understand. RPs Sulfur content is not especially high, but it seems to act a bit like a delayless glitter. After burn-out of the wheel a Senko Hanabi effect was seen to come from a ball of dross at the nozzle of the driver. It was not caught on the video, but it continued for almost a minute.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Saxon Video | video/x-msvideo | 7.816 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 26.292 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 31.634 kbytes |
| Three Frame Loop | image/gif | 186.682 kbytes |
| Multiple Frames | image/gif | 956.390 kbytes |
| The Final Spurt | image/gif | 1.068 Mbytes |