Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 9:29 amPosted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 8:08 pmPosted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 8:12 pmPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:40 pm
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Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 2:01 pm
Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 7:34 pmPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 8:29 pmPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 8:43 pm| PaulS wrote: |
| I'm not sayin' anything about any explosives I may or may not have made or played with in my youth. I did put a paper and wood rocket completely through an 8" apple tree once from only about 15 feet. The rocket didn't even have a chance to get close to its top speed (which took 100 yards or so). When I started making model rockets I had the usual "fizzlers" and some that blew up on the pad. When I finally got the fuel recipe to the point that it was consistent and produced a good bit of energy I finally got rockets that whould consistantly perform as designed. It is hard to get really fast model rockets with less than 4 oz. of fuel but I finally found how to do it. I even made nozzles for hypersonic flow - something not available in model rocket engines of the time. Top speed that I ever calculated was mach 2.5 (approx) timed over a 200 yard range. I never had a warhead on any of my rockets and they used no metal parts. Other than for specific tests I always fired them vertically with a means of recovery - usually a long ribbon so I could find them. I had a design that I would liked to have tried for an IR guidance system but life got in the way and I never got around to making or testing it. |
Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 8:54 pmPosted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 11:09 pmPosted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 7:16 am | Vince wrote: |
| through the wall of the house next door and "took out" the roast in the oven. Cheers, Vince |
Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 7:43 pmPosted: Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:49 pm| Vince wrote: |
| Sounds terribly like a guy that used to live up the street from me when I was a teenager. Him and one of his mates were pretty clever when it came to chemistry... sooooo...they made their own "fuel". This was a mixture of two very common elements that are readily available from hardware stores and chemists (drugstores). Mix the metal dust and the yellow powder in the correct proportions and you could do some very interesting things with the resulting mix. It burns extremely hot (will melt glass with ease), gives off copious amounts of smoke (may be toxic, not sure), is incredibly bright (a teaspoon of the stuff in a glass enclosed telephone box makes a huge "light bulb"), wrapped and sealed in wax paper and ignited with the correct fuse gives a HUGE BADABOOM. Pack the mixture into an aluminum tube about 2.5 feet long, with good straight fins and with a steel exhaust nozzle will put this rocket about 3000 feet into the air, straight up...we had the civil aviation mob looking for us because they picked one up on their radar in Sydney. Definitely fun stuff. They stopped "playing" with the stuff though when one of the guys over compressed a quantity of the mix sealed into a 3" diameter metal container. It spontaneously ignited, blew a brick garden shed to pieces, vapourised half his arm, put a large chunk of shrapnel through his leg, another piece of shrapnel went across the yard, through the fence, through the wall of the house next door and "took out" the roast in the oven. Also broke windows everywhere. The guy that was playing with it has permanent injuries, apart from his arm...loss of hearing, scars everywhere and dodgy eyesight. They laugh about it now, but they were very lucky one or both were not killed. Cheers, Vince |
Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2010 6:50 am| radar wrote: |
| I found out that potato guns can do a lot of damage as well. About 2 years ago we confiscated one off a bunch of morons who were firing frozen oranges at silage bales near some houses, the oranges were penetrating about 6 - 8 inches at about 20 meters. My staff then took it up onto a lookout which over looks the town on a nightshift and came scurrying back to the station. I asked what had occoured and got told they had used a plug of paper rather than anything solid, prepped it with wd40 and hit the igniter, the jet of flame was about 3 foot long from the muzzle and they thought they'd woken the town with the boom. Boys and their toys. I am thinking of building one to launch my bait off the beach with my surfcaster, I reckon 200 - 300 meters is a decent cast by anyones books. |
Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2010 1:53 pmAll times are GMT - 7 Hours