I was concerned that granulating the rocket propellant had some how effected it and contributed to the stinger failure. The stinger's nozzles were slagged pretty badly, which I assumed was the glitter delay, but I decided to make a conventional rocket to test the remaining composition batch.
Similar to all previous core-burning 8 mm rockets, this one however was rammed on the nipple alone, not the rocket mandrel. I decided to try drilling out the core, basically because I was too lazy to deal with stuck hollow drifts this time.
About 8 mm of D1 glitter was rammed before the bulkhead as a delay element. The waxed cat litter bulkhead was drilled out to one side as a passfire. Some -20+40 mesh pulverone was placed in the remaining 7 mm of case as a break charge.
A heading was prepared in a scrap to 12 mm ID thin wall tube. Some Granite star fragments and -40 mesh pulverone as a filler. This star bag was taped to the top of the rocket motor.
The core was drilled out with 2.5 mm drill, a stick hot-melt glued on and thin blackmatch fusing added as usual.
Worked great.
Absoutely screamed off the launch rail and up at least 100 metres into the sky. My camera operator was definately impressed with the flight!
The break was poor, in fact I don't think the stars ignited at all, the seperator I used during assembly may have protected them from the break charge.
Something was seen burning dimly as it fell after the break, but it may have been wadding, pieces of the header, or the motor itself. The header was added as a quick hack anyway, and it wasn't the point of this test.
The propellant was definately not effected by the granulation proceedure. It anything it has increased its power. It burns wonderfully in a pile, almost as fast as the pulverone I used for the break. It is definately much neater and easier to deal with once 'riced'. All future batches will be prepared this way.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Flight Video | video/x-msvideo | 427.644 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 63.078 kbytes |