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Thread Author: VxFan	Replies: 40

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Mon 12 Jan 15 01:53

Insane Homebrew Rocket - VxFan

Received this earlier via email. Takes a little while to get going, but I thought it was quite impressive.

theawesomer.com/insane-homebrew-rocket/303503/

Apologies if you've already seen it.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 08:39

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Zero

brilliant

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Mon 12 Jan 15 09:01

Insane Homebrew Rocket - madf

Superb..

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Mon 12 Jan 15 09:31

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Crankcase

That's brilliant that is.

If anyone is interested in rockets and reading, this is highly recommended.

www.amazon.co.uk/October-Sky-Homer-Hickam/dp/185702995X

Last edited by: Crankcase on Mon 12 Jan 15 at 09:35

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Mon 12 Jan 15 09:59

Insane Homebrew Rocket - henry k

Better control and recover/reuse than many :-(

Loved it!

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Mon 12 Jan 15 10:22

Insane Homebrew Rocket - VxFan

Can you imagine if this was in the UK.

There would be an exclusion zone, hi-viz, hard hats, fire extinguishers and marshalls, and not to mention a 500 page risk assessment.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 10:50

Insane Homebrew Rocket - madf

>> Can you imagine if this was in the UK.
>>
>> There would be an exclusion zone, hi-viz, hard hats, fire extinguishers and marshalls, and not
>> to mention a 500 page risk assessment.
>>

Judging by the height it reached, it could hit an aircraft taking off or landing..

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Mon 12 Jan 15 11:41

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Zero

>> Can you imagine if this was in the UK.
>>
>> There would be an exclusion zone, hi-viz, hard hats, fire extinguishers and marshalls, and not
>> to mention a 500 page risk assessment.

It would never have happened if the authorities got wind of it, and if it had happened those responsible would have been in jail, refused bail, awaiting trial. Terrorism charges probably.

Last edited by: Zero on Mon 12 Jan 15 at 11:41

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Mon 12 Jan 15 12:04

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Mapmaker

I'm afraid I think I'm glad things like that don't happen in the UK...

This looks pretty cool, on the rocket front.

themetapicture.com/using-matches-and-household/

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Mon 12 Jan 15 13:43

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Crankcase

Impressive to me that someone can be that organised. I especially liked the "close the match box to get your preferred angle of launch" idea. Simple stuff but dashed clever.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 14:04

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

Match rockets? Pah, made them years ago. But then I'm a go to guy if one wants something spectacular on the cheap.

Ammonium Iodide is fun, but a school mate of mine wrecked his bedroom carpet with the stuff as the idiot dried it out in saucers on his bedroom window sill. As it partially solidified, it went off and shot the contents in the air. The wet lumps didn't go off, so landed on the carpet - which absorbed the moisture nicely and made entering the room a bit of an explosion festival.

My brother 'borrowed' the ingredients from me while I was away at university, and made himself deaf for a few hours. I've no idea what punishment he got, but I was given the task of getting rid of what he had made. Rather fun as you might expect, and although they said nothing, I got the feeling my parents expected me to do what did, dispose of an unstable explosive by letting it off!

Danger time for kids is about 12 or 13 when they start doing catalyst chemistry and think, 'if I catalysed an explosive, it would make a bigger bang'. Of course, that is true, but as a general rule - never catalyse an explosive as it's inherently unstable to start with and making it less stable is not as they say, a very good idea.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 15:47

Insane Homebrew Rocket - sherlock47

>>>Danger time for kids is about 12 or 13 when they<<<

So true - I knew one who was left blind after his pestle and mortar exploded whislt grinding up an experimental mix. At least my experimental rules included the 'never grind a mixture' and only detonate with an electrical remote device. Early experiments included old radio valves (remember those?) with a top cap. You could remove the top cap to break a small hole on the glass envelope, fill with desired mixture and use the heater as an igniter. Cheaper than using broken light bulbs.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 15:53

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Runfer D'Hills

Ever fixed a curtain ring to the top of an Airfix plane, inserted a banger into the fuselage and hooked the whole assembly onto your mum's washing line before igniting?

The effect is a bit like drinking too much, a short spell of euphoria followed by hours of regret and discomfort.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 15:58

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Zero

>> Ever fixed a curtain ring to the top of an Airfix plane,

preferably German, hung from the ceiling, burning while you whop round it with your Airfix spitfire failing to notice the burning plastic dripping onto the now burning nylon carpet........

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Mon 12 Jan 15 16:04

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Runfer D'Hills

The other incident I have clear memories of not ending well, at several levels, was the time I decided to clean some bike parts in petrol. I'd started down the slippery slope by without reference, using my mum's baking tray to put the petrol in, the secondment of my dad's petrol compounded the situation, the mess in the garage caused a bit of a row and I was instructed not to pour the remaining petrol from the tray down the drain but nonetheless to make damn sure it was thoroughly cleaned and returned to its rightful cupboard.

So I lit it...

In the garage.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 16:10

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Crankcase

Ooh heck. In the old neglect-a-child-oh-come-on-we-all-did-it seventies, I was left alone in the house and decided to light the fire. It didn't want to go. I'd seen my Dad encourage the bonfire with a splash of petrol.

You can picture the rest.

As to the carpet - the hearthrug was carefully and artfully placed, and nothing was discovered until the next outing of Mr Hoover. Then it was one of those occasions where you're upstairs and you hear your full name being bellowed from the bottom of the stairs. A unique feeling, followed shortly by another.

The trousers, well, I hid them under the bed, more or less forever. They might still be there for all I know.

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Mon 12 Jan 15 16:40

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Pat

When my son was about 12 years old and on the school holidays one summer we had a bit of a catastrophe.

He'd bought an old Matchless G5 all in bits from someone's shed with his pocket money and I'd been outside all morning with him helping to put it back together again.
We went in for some lunch and decided to have boiled eggs but then got waylaid with him trying to teach me to headbang properly to Saxon 'Wheels of Steel' because I was taking him and three mates to the De Montfort hall at Leicester at the weekend and of course, I mustn't show him up.
We never heard the bang, but we certainly saw hard boiled eggs that had boiled dry and exploded all over the walls, ceiling and cooker....

We never did tell his Dad and he never found out either:)

I was a cool Mum!

Not much good at cooking and sewing but ......cool!

Pat

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Tue 13 Jan 15 01:43

Insane Homebrew Rocket - VxFan

Anyone make key bangers as a youth?

You know the sort of thing. A key with a hole in the end. You pack the hole with ground down match heads, then insert a nail into the hole. Finally attach one end of a piece of string to the other end of the key (that you usually put a key ring on) and the other end of the string to the nail. Then find something solid like a wall and swing the nail head against it. BANG!

I got fed up with keys keep splitting though, so I bored a 6 mm diameter hole into a 10mm length of steel bar in metalwork class at school and found a nail that just fitted it perfectly. Result. An even bigger BANG and no damage to the steel bar. Had to keep replacing nails though ;)

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Tue 13 Jan 15 07:46

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Zero

>> Anyone make key bangers as a youth?
>>
>> You know the sort of thing. A key with a hole in the end. You
>> pack the hole with ground down match heads, then insert a nail into the hole.

Yup, but we made key GUNS!

same principal but heat the key with a blow torch. The nail (as long as the key is fixed) is then turned into a lethal projectile.

Ah! Your old mans paraffin blow lamp. Now there was an instrument of dangerous instability prone to morphing into a demonic flame thrower ejecting streams of burning paraffin over anything within range.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 08:38

Insane Homebrew Rocket - sherlock47

We have at last found the common thread that nearly all of the older regulars here share. A childhood of living dangerously with home made combustible devices.

Did any body else use the technique of using a large nut with bolts screwed in from either end with 'the mixture' compressed in the middle? The ideal bolts were retrieved from railway embankments - from memory about 1 inch thread? Thrown 'end over end' they would explode on landing on a hard surface. This must have been in the pre-blinding era described above - as I know that I would never tighten the bolts down now! Maybe I just delegated that task!

Last edited by: sherlock47 on Tue 13 Jan 15 at 08:40

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:00

Insane Homebrew Rocket - CGNorwich

And of course tied to a rock the 2 1/2d bangers made a fine depth charge. You had to wait until they started fizzing before throwing them in the pond. Gunpowder once burning has its own oxygen supply so won't go out under water. Results could be spectacular. Even more dramatic was same technique without the rock and dropped down the lavatory pan and flushed.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:21

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Haywain

" Even more dramatic was same technique without the rock and dropped down the lavatory pan and flushed."

You mean like this ......

youtu.be/8Qt95KUOX_8

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:30

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

Made a couple of canons. First one was nothing more than a steel tube with end flattened and folded over. Second one was bigger and the end was properly welded. Fuel/explosive was weedkiller and sugar. Because the quantity of added flame suppressant (usually just salt) was variable, we mixed the explosive in batches, and tested by burning a small amount in the air. Starting point was always sugar rich, we added weedkiller till there was no black residue from the sugar. Very simple method but worked very well.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:35

Insane Homebrew Rocket - CGNorwich

I think we migh be coming a bit close to providing information that could endanger life with that SP

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Tue 13 Jan 15 14:16

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

Europe banned Sodium Chlorate as a weedkiller in 2009/10. Can still be got hold of, but the days of getting it from a garden centre or a DIY shed have gone. Anyone who listens in chemistry lessons from about 12 could have worked out the method, rocket science it's not!

If the stuff was still readily available then perhaps.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 14:21

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Bromptonaut

>> Europe banned Sodium Chlorate as a weedkiller in 2009/10.

Even without the internet that sort of information was easy to come by. Sure I can recall political outrage back in seventies because it was in library books that might have been accessible to the IRA etc.

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Thu 15 Jan 15 21:50

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Kevin

>Sure I can recall political outrage back in seventies because it was in library books that might
>have been accessible to the IRA etc.

As a 13yo schoolboy with a brilliant chemistry teacher I developed an interest in explosives.

At the time you could go to your local library and fill out a request form for books about any subject you wanted and the library would post the request form back to you when the books were available.

I requested books about explosives and fireworks and when I went to collect them they had 14 large reference books for me. A few of them were 'history of' type books but most of them were what you could call recipe books describing how to cook up everything from gunpowder and chlorate mixtures, all the way up to industrial and military stuff like anfo and TNT.
I experimented making quite a few of them but I have to admit that nitroglycerine was the scariest to make. The reaction is strongly exothermic and it was difficult to keep the mixture cold enough to prevent the stuff becoming even more unstable and decomposing into huge clouds of Nitrogen Dioxide.

The fireworks books were excellent and went into fine detail about the correct packaging needed to get the effects you wanted.

All the compounds I needed were available from a company called Prestons in Sheffield who supplied most of the labs in the area and my Dad bought the stuff for me.

Fast forward to today and MOD Aldermaston frequently advertise for staff wanting to play with explosives:

careers.awe.co.uk/wd/plsql/wd_portal.show_job?p_web_site_id=505&p_web_page_id=206787

If my careers master at school had told me that I could get paid for making things go bang I wouldn't be doing what I am now. The pay might be poor but think of the job satisfaction.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:36

Insane Homebrew Rocket - henry k

A Sparklets syphon CO2 cartridge filled banger gunpowder plus Jetex fuse and dethemoliser fuse was our preferred entertainment.

As i have probably published before our economy entertainment.

In days of yore when traffic was very very light and few houses had door bells.
Tie light weight string from one knocker to another on the other side the road.
Continue until a car collected the strings and folks all answered their door and found none there but other puzzled folk staring at them.

We would collect dogs mess in a newspaper, place it on a nicely scrubbed doorstep, set fire to it, knock on the door, run and hide.
The owner doing a Tango on their door step was our reward.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 09:59

Insane Homebrew Rocket - smokie

A banger in a soft cowpat was often a source of amusement to me.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 11:40

Insane Homebrew Rocket - madf

>> And of course tied to a rock the 2 1/2d bangers made a fine depth
>> charge. You had to wait until they started fizzing before throwing them in the pond.
>> Gunpowder once burning has its own oxygen supply so won't go out under water. Results
>> could be spectacular. Even more dramatic was same technique without the rock and dropped down
>> the lavatory pan and flushed.
>>
>>

Yes. Not the lavatory pan though...

In the nearby fishing town, the locals took one mackerel, a 2p (two old pennies for the babes amongst us), banger, stuffed into mouth of small dead mackerel and thrown to a flying seagull...5 seconds later and a bang, and a huge cloud of feathers...

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Tue 13 Jan 15 14:23

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

In the nearby fishing town, the locals took one mackerel, a 2p (two old pennies for the babes amongst us), banger, stuffed into mouth of small dead mackerel and thrown to a flying seagull...5 seconds later and a bang, and a huge cloud of feathers...

Ah, a variation on the carbide trick. Carbide can still be bought, I've a tin of it - used for lamp demonstrations. But not as easily obtained as in the past, mine comes from a seller of oil and similar for vintage motorbikes, carbide lights were the norm until about 1925.

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Tue 13 Jan 15 10:13

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Roger.

>> Anyone make key bangers as a youth?
age to the steel bar. Had to keep replacing nails though ;)
>>
Oh, crikey - that brings back memories!
Plus..........................
Andrews Liver Salt tin with about a teaspoonful of powder left in it, add a drop of water, lid hammered back on - leave in dorm - wait for bang and the appearance of a very cross matron: snigger, snigger!

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Tue 13 Jan 15 11:23

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Ted

Memories of Candle Cowboys here...........using Roman Candles for Wild West duels. Can't recall anyone being blinded or having his clothes set on fire. You only got about 6 rounds at a time though. I bemoan the passing of Rip-Raps as well .
On a slightly different tack, I worked in the force information room for a couple of years. We had ' lamp & key ' telephones. A worthwhile pastime was for two of us to ring an internal line at the same time.. Often the recipients answered together and we could sit back and listen to the ensuing conversation...." Yes, what can I do for you ? " " You rang me " " No, I didn't "...and so on. Often the two would know each other from the past and would strike up a conversation irrespective of rank.

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Wed 14 Jan 15 21:00

Insane Homebrew Rocket - zookeeper

i used to dismantle star shells cant remember the brand ..it had a fusee match and a small charge of c4 .. if done properly would lift a steel bucket 30 yards into the heavens if done right ...if done wrong ,, no fingers

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Thu 15 Jan 15 10:08

Insane Homebrew Rocket - madf

Reminds me of the time when brother and I obtained a marine flare carcase - empty (the rocket bit) and decided to refill it. So bought lots of bangers and emptied them carefully of gunpowder and filled up teh rocket. It took a LOT of gunpowder so we ended up buying the big cylindrical mortars type of fireworks and using those. Filled it, added blue touchpaper fuse, lit it and ran.

Well of course we had not made a rocket as we had not tamped down teh gunpowder and it was loose.. so it all ignited at once.

Our parents were out at the time and often wondered why we were partially deaf for about 2 days.. and why they kept finding small pieces of stick around the garden... (I suspect they really knew).

Loudest bang I have ever heard.. and a huge flash... (about 8 ozs of gunpowder)

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Thu 15 Jan 15 14:16

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

The ordinary and rather pathetic these days, banger can be markedly improved by wrapping many turns of sellotape round it.

A thunderflash, now there's an idea and one can buy them in the UK!

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Thu 15 Jan 15 17:32

Insane Homebrew Rocket - madf

Be careful, next we will discussing more serious forms of home made explosives and we will find ourselves in jail

Eek.

You lot may of course, I'll get clemency for informing:-)

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Thu 15 Jan 15 17:42

Insane Homebrew Rocket - CGNorwich

>> The ordinary and rather pathetic these days, banger can be markedly improved by wrapping many
>> turns of sellotape

Actually it was made illegal to sell bangers, firecrackers and the like in the UK at the end of the nineties.

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Thu 15 Jan 15 19:18

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Slidingpillar

Actually it was made illegal to sell bangers, firecrackers and the like in the UK at the end of the nineties.

Isn't officialdom a waste of skin? Boring lot. Probably a good job I don't have kids, I'd get locked up for what I'd teach.

Would you believe I was the safety officer at work... Honest!

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Thu 15 Jan 15 17:53

Insane Homebrew Rocket - Bromptonaut

>> A thunderflash, now there's an idea and one can buy them in the UK!

Our hosts on New Years Eve had a couple of expired marine distress flares. Decided that sixty miles from sea and amongst all the other pyrotechnics there was nil chance of misinterpretation so they were set off. Practice for the several yacht mariners present you understand.

They were pretty impressive.

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Thu 15 Jan 15 20:17

Insane Homebrew Rocket - NortonES2

I seem to remember a Webley flare pistol my dad had in his kit of army things. Rather stumpy barrel. Would not do a person any good at all if fired at them, intentionally or otherwise. Early lessons in avoiding the armed forces perhaps.

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