Redneck Rocketry

in a previous project we used sugar
stump remover and a little bit of kitty
litter to make 45 equivalent rocket
motors in this project we’re adding time
delays ejection charges and sending a
duct tape rocket over a thousand feet
high I just made ten rocket motors for
under five dollars and they only took
about ten minutes each now to see if
they’ll even work at all let’s strap one
to a couple of bricks for static testing
and light it up when the propellant
catches you can see it’s actually got an
impressive amount of thrust now of
course this begs the obvious question
what would happen if we put one in the
paper rocket from a previous project so
I just made a glorified version of the
same thing using cardboard and duct tape
you can see the cardboard fins are just
hot glued to the body and I reinforced
the upper part of the tube with 3/4 inch
PVC pipe to keep it rigid the hole at
the back has just enough room to accept
a single sugar motor and you can see a
little metal wire holds it down in place
okay her rocket is loaded and ready to
fly but we still need a way to launch it
I used the lid of a cooking pot and a
sawed-off marshmallow roasting stick to
make a simple blast pad and the Rockets
just held on with pieces cut from the
body table of a pen all right let’s
light it off and see how it does
now that’s not too shabby for a rocket
made from sugar and cardboard from the
time of Apogee it took a little over
eight seconds to hit the ground which
means this thing shot up over a thousand
feet high how cool is that the problem
of course is that there’s no parachute
on this thing which means it’s gonna
lawn dart straight into the ground every
time that’s exactly why I’m out in the
boonies miles away from any people or
property now it’s important to mention
here that potassium nitrate is
hygroscopic meaning when the propellant
is exposed to air it’ll slowly absorb
moisture until the fuel loses potency
this mix is about a month old and won’t
even light off anymore you can see this
rocket doesn’t produce any thrust
whatsoever to reverse the hydration you
could put it in the oven at 300 degrees
Fahrenheit for 30 minutes if you’re
willing to risk the possibility of an
insurance claim okay to make a parachute
ejection charge we’re gonna need to add
a time delay function and a little black
powder I just made this one out of
acrylic so you can see exactly what will
be happening inside the motor during
launch you can see that when the white
mix ignites it burns incredibly fast and
suddenly at the black mark where the
delay mix begins this amount of powder
should give about a five-second delay
then ignite the ejection charge which
you’ll see how to make in just a minute
now the recipe for delay mix is so
incredibly simple all we need to do is
separate 20 grams of the white mix made
in our sugar rocket project and add 15%
baking soda by weight which in this case
brings the mix up to 23 grams total put
the modified mix in a container and
shake it around for about a minute to
blend it together as much as possible
and that’s it just by adding a little
baking soda we’ve modified the rocket
propellant into a fairly reliable
time-delay mix that will burn one second
for every sixteenth of an inch I
typically use a five second delay on my
motors and ended up making a new ramrod
to fit that profile it should be obvious
that the delay mix goes in after the
white mix but before the kitty litter
endcap the last step is the ejection
charge and for that we need a little
black powder in a small drill bit the
bit I’m using is a 3/32 inch bit and
using the modified template we can gauge
how deep we’ll need to drill through the
clay plug to expose the delay mix
underneath this will need to be drilled
out by hand the same way we did the
nozzle in the sugar rocket video and
it’s important to watch carefully for
trace of white powder on the tip of the
bed this is our confirmation that we’re
all the way through the clay so to
finish it up let’s drop a bit of black
powder down the hole cover the clay plug
a few grains deep then compact it with a
few taps from the wooden rod this
compacted ejection charge should hold
firmly in place and the modified rocket
motor is finished now using another
acrylic motor you can see that the
instant the burn hits the delay mix it
stops suddenly and burns dramatically
slower for about 5 seconds when it
reaches the black powder though the
charge ignites with enough power to push
out a parachute the delay can be
adjusted for any length of time we need
and the rule of thumb is a sixteenth of
an inch per second well now you know how
to modify your sugar motors to have time
delays and parachute ejection charges
rather than taking the riskier approach
of launching duct-tape rockets and just
hoping they don’t hit anything important
well that’s it for now if you like this
project perhaps you’ll like some of my
others check them out at the king of
random calm hey if you’re across the
pond or in another country I realize you
may not have access to some of these
materials so I’ve got another rocky
building project coming up that I
guarantee you’ll be able to do
so keep an eye out for that video coming
very soon and in the meantime if you
still want to build rocket motors like
these I strongly recommend you join a
rocking Club first so you don’t get
yourself into trouble there are a lot of
regulations and safety precautions that
you need to be aware of one thing I
didn’t tell you is that these motors can
be modified to work with sd’s model
rockets as well but I’m thinking about
doing a video on building a rocket with
a parachute from scratch so if you’re
interested in seeing that let me know in
the comments and I may put together
something for next spring and one final
thought if you have to ask where to get
black-powder this definitely isn’t a
project you should be playing with yet
so let me just say this
it’s actually easier to find than
potassium nitrate thanks for watching to
the end I hope you enjoyed what you saw
and I hope to see you around for the
next project video bye