Smallish case, 40 mm long, 8 mm ID, 12 mm OD. Bulkhead of wadding a hot-melt glue. Nozzle of cat litter treated with 5% wax. 2.5 mm core and nozzle bore running full length of grain.
D1 Glitter Composition:
58 Potassium Nitrate
18 Sulfur
11 Charcoal (airfloat)
7 Aluminium (-325 mesh, spherical)
7 Sodium Bicarbonate
4 Dextrin
1 Boric Acid
Composition was ball milled sans the metal for 1 hour. The Aluminium was then screened in and tumble mixed without media for about 5 minutes. Only a small quantity was prepared as a test, about 10 grams, enough to pump some test stars, the remainder was used in this rocket.
Fused with narrow blackmatch, glued with meal-NC paste.
Standard stick stabiliser.
It flew, somewhat.
I didn't actually expect a glitter composition to be capable of developing much thrust in such a short-cored rocket motor. As expected, it had a lot of trouble getting off the ground.
It did glitter quite nicely though, but quite a bit more sparse than the stars do, or even the loose composition meal does.
With a longer core or perhaps a bit more milling this composition could actually be used as a glittering rocket propellant. It is probably better used as a saxon or glitter gerb composition.
The 'chuffing' effect of unstable combustion was interesting, almost like an AP composite motor running at too low pressure.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 695.132 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 29.771 kbytes |