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Email me: williaty

Fri, 30 Apr 2004

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:
God damn big rocket
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:
Filling the main chute
Once the chute filled, Dad ran down to provide a sense of scale.
Big assed chute
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.
Pulling the main away from a tree

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!

writebacks...

Chaos wrote

OOohhhh....

Um, listing the dangers is disturbing only making me want to play with it more, although perhaps it does instill a bit of respect and thus caution. Instead of just playing with it, that makes me want to harness the power to do something cool with. I don't have a video camera or video experience, but I'd be quite willing to take still photos of the rocket. I'd prefer to take video footage, but I want it to come out decent so I'd better just take stills. *makes futile attempt to quit drooling over controlled and skillful use of explosives*

Aaron wrote

Sweet

Yeah I'd be up for seeing that son'bitch hit the sky

Look I used <p>'s And everything!

I'd move the advisory to go between the Ttiel and the Comments, that way some one might actualy read it!

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