I've always wanted to try making helicopter/bee style turning devices. This was my first try.
The KN/Sucrose/Gum-Arabic cookie-like propellant I made up was crushed and packed into a 40 mm long cardboard tube, 10 mm ID. The tube is the core from a fax roll. End plugs were made of paper and hot-melt glue, about 10 mm thick.
A 3 mm diameter hole was made at one end, fused with a meal-NC tissue paper fuse. A rotor was made by gently heating a paddle-pop stick in the middle over my alcohol burner and twisting. It was hot-melt glued with to the end opposite the fuse-hole.
Produced very little thrust.
I don't know if the fuel was moisture tainted like the Yawn style rocket, but it basically just smoked with a small flame. Towards the end of the burn it did heat up and make about three slow turns.
I didn't actually expect this one to take off, but I did expect a good spin up on the ground. The test was mainly to assess the wings strength and attachment. I hoped the wings would stop it rolling over and turning into a small fountain like the last two hummers did.
The idea seems sound, the propellant needs to be better. The hole in the case burnt out to nearly 8 mm, clearly I need to make up some tooling and ram a nozzle in cat litter with intersecting drill holes. Maybe a little waterglass in the hole?
The video quality really sucks. The camera won't always focus up in low light conditions, the audio is more useful giving burn time.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Device Burn | video/x-msvideo | 2.447 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 55.190 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 28.990 kbytes |