Rocket Experiments - Clustered Rocket
Date: 2006-01-23
Description
A quick experiment to practice clustering rocket motors.
Three 1/4" motors were made on Rich Wolter's tooling and Pyrotube cases using the good old Contaminated Meal batch.
All three were tied around a central stick using two clove hitches. Each motor was fused with blackmatch, and the matching drawn together. Some kitchen paper was pasted over the ends of all three motors and one length of blackmatch brought out for ignition.
Comments
Worked OK.
Performance wasn't a huge improvement over just a single motor, but it did fly a bit higher and much farther down range and perhaps somewhat faster as well.
Unfortunately it is almost impossible to see the individual exhaust plumes of the motors on the video to assess ignition timing. There was a slight deviation from straight flight, this may be more aerodynamic than thrust related, the stick was a bit bent.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.109 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 26.358 kbytes |