If It's Longer Than It's Wide -Friday, April 30, 2004 -4:50 am-
I went up to my dad's place with Michelle today to help him test some parts of the recovery system on his latest project. This is his latest project:
The first thing we did was to confirm that 6 grains of blackpowder was enough to seperate the two upper sections of the rocket. Well, it worked. And then some. It blew the two pieces of rocket about 20 feet apart, one end only stopping when it ran into a brick wall. Considering this was substantially less blackbowder than the formula suggests for the volume we were pressurising, it suggests that the rocket is damn well built. After we knew the rocket would seperate, we needed to prove that the drogue chute would fill and then pull the main free. The drogue willed without problems and the main released easily. I was a bit hard to fill the main chute due to it's size. This is the main chute as we're trying to fill it:
Once the chute filled, Dad ran down to provide a sense of scale.
We played with it a bit before it took a dive for the trees and started draggin me, Dad, and the John Deere across the yard. This is just before the tractor began to move while we were still trying to keep it out of the trees and not worrying about sliding downrange.
Since I'm sure this looks fun to at least three of you, a word of caution. This is a 30 foot diameter parachute. It is dangerous. It is completly capable of amputating a limb or head, or even crushing your ribcage if you get between it and wherever it wants to be. People have died when a chute of this size inflated unxepectedly. If you want to play with something like this, find someone who has real world experience with large surface areas and wind.
If you want to learn more about high powered rocketry, start at Tripoli Rocketry Assocation. This rocket is supposed to launch Saturday the 15th of May. If anyone wants to go, I need photographers and videographers!