Need a good reason to thoroughly clean your lathe? Try machining some graphite. A good shop vacuum cleaner such as a wet /dry Karcher helped a lot in keeping the mess to a minimum. However it showed over time that it was unavoidable that, after machining a full graphite nozzle, the entire lathe was covered in graphite particles. I had
One week, one part. The nozzle retainer will hold the full graphite nozzle in place. It is a variation on the simplest form of a retaining ring as used earlier on the KILO 6G motor. The variation consists of: the nozzle retainer has a divergent section where it lengthens the actual divergent section of the
Finished the casing today. It is 1780mm long and will hold 12 BATES grains. Important factor in long rockets is that all parts being properly aligned. To facilitate this all the tubes (casing, airframe & nose cone) rest on square faces. As I didn’t want to rely on the squareness of the band saw cut I had
After having loads of fun with the Wildman – Intimidator 5 it is time for a new experimental rocket. A minimum diameter rocket for some serious altitude. Based on the very succesful KILO 6G motor with a higher total impulse, more grains and updated with a light weight 86x3mm motor casing. Rocket will be made “sustainer-ready” similar like de DECA
Finished the combined retainer ring / coupler for the KILO 12G “lite” motor. The coupler was made from 80x5mm tube and almost a direct fit into the 86x3mm casing. It is a bit beefy. However lets first see how she copes with the 96bar MEOP and the countersinking of the 86x3mm casing which will probably extend into the retaining ring / coupler
During machine it was noticed that the wet lay up has, as large as 1mm, eccentricity. Even when the alignment jig was used to center the 3D printed plugs in line. Hence, up to 2mm extra outer diameter needed to be laminated so any eccentricity can be removed during the final machining stage. A stepped
I started out making a truncated gore pattern and a spray template out of cardboard. The template can be downloaded from here: 86mm Von Karman nose cone / spray template. The two A4 papers can be easily aligned with tape and secured to the 1mm thick cardboard with spray adhesive. You will have to fabricate
Alternatively to the foam plug I decided to try out a 3D printed plug for increased accuracy of my 86mm Von Karman composite nose cone. Initially this was due to the fact I ran into some inaccuracy / concentricity difficulties of the finished wet lay up of the foam plug (which in hind sight was not related
So it is time for a new rocket, a minimum diameter one. With this new rocket the need for a custom nose cone arises. After some consideration and positive builds by “cryoscum” on Australian Rocketry Forum I decided to make a foam nose cone with wet lay up. Just to test this principle as I
Another launch together with the Navro and DARE. Conditions were fine with a picture perfect launch. The Intimidator 5 was flown on a KNDX 2% RIO reload, together with an updated 440 Mhz – 1W Talky GPS tracker by LD and an 5.8GHz – 600mW VTx with ImmersionRC antenna tracker ground station. Please click here to read the