Rocket Experiments - Caduceus Rocket
Date: 2006-01-23
Description
As discussed on r-bp for the past few days... My first try at making a Caduceus Rocket. I didn't have appropriate end-burning tooling available for the 1/4" scale I wanted to do the initial experiment with, so I chose to use whistle motors which could be loaded with my existing tooling.
Two Salicylate Whistle end-burners were charged in Pyrotube casings, with about 1" of propellant each (half full not including clay plugs).
The frame was made from bamboo kebab stick. The cross piece an off-cut tied in place with twine. The two drivers were tacked in place with hot-melt glue before being bound in place tightly with a mixture of clove hitches and overhand knots.
Some thin match pipe was rolled from kitchen paper around a kebab stick, and a stick of blackmatch threaded through it and between the drivers. Some more pasted kitchen paper nosed each driver and held the match pipe in place. The center of the piping was pierced with a short length of blackmatch to facilitate ignition.
Comments
Worked pretty well.
For my first try on a tiny scale with kinda exotic materials, I think it worked great. It only achieved about 20 metres apogee, but that isn't suprising with such relatively feeble drivers.
The effect is kinda dry without a tail to really show the double spiral of exhaust plumes, and the video is a bit motion blured in places but the driver flames can be seen forming the classic double helix in several frames.
The rocket fell back quite close to the launch point, almost at my feet in fact.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 1.558 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 41.277 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 41.275 kbytes |
| Spectrogram | image/jpeg | 57.581 kbytes |