boatgeek
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- Dec 27, 2014
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My major winter project this year is a bunch of firsts:
First 54mm motor
First rocket designed from blank sheet for L2 motors
First hand-laid tube
First NC-cut fiberglass fins and bulkheads
First large scratch-built toroidal chute
And what brought you here: First square rocket. Here's a couple of pictures of the Rhino model so far.
You know when you get a package of plastic dinosaurs and there's the sail-backed one? That's a dimetrodon. They were the top predators of their time, about 200 million years ago, long before most of the other dinosaurs we know and love. Because I really like to do biomimicry in rocketry and I'm basing this on a sail-backed creature, the fin shape is naturally based on a dimetrodon sail (D. gigashomogenes if you care).
The tubes will be laid up on a piece of 4"x4"x1/4" steel square tube that a co-worker scavenged from his dad's shipyard's scrap bin. I have laid up two short test pieces. The first one was a dog's breakfast, but the quality of the second makes me pretty confident that I can make this all work. It turns out that having the proper tools and keeping tension on the glass going on to the mandrel are both extremely important. More on that in a future post when I have the pictures. I'll also have to do a lot of custom work to make couplers and the nose cone. I haven't really figured that all out yet, but it will involve some combination of 3-D printed parts, wood moldings, and fiberglass.
I'll follow along with and some details about simulations to support stability and altitude predictions in future posts. CFD is involved to try to validate an Open Rocket based approach. There's also more backstory on the name to come.
First 54mm motor
First rocket designed from blank sheet for L2 motors
First hand-laid tube
First NC-cut fiberglass fins and bulkheads
First large scratch-built toroidal chute
And what brought you here: First square rocket. Here's a couple of pictures of the Rhino model so far.
You know when you get a package of plastic dinosaurs and there's the sail-backed one? That's a dimetrodon. They were the top predators of their time, about 200 million years ago, long before most of the other dinosaurs we know and love. Because I really like to do biomimicry in rocketry and I'm basing this on a sail-backed creature, the fin shape is naturally based on a dimetrodon sail (D. gigashomogenes if you care).
The tubes will be laid up on a piece of 4"x4"x1/4" steel square tube that a co-worker scavenged from his dad's shipyard's scrap bin. I have laid up two short test pieces. The first one was a dog's breakfast, but the quality of the second makes me pretty confident that I can make this all work. It turns out that having the proper tools and keeping tension on the glass going on to the mandrel are both extremely important. More on that in a future post when I have the pictures. I'll also have to do a lot of custom work to make couplers and the nose cone. I haven't really figured that all out yet, but it will involve some combination of 3-D printed parts, wood moldings, and fiberglass.
I'll follow along with and some details about simulations to support stability and altitude predictions in future posts. CFD is involved to try to validate an Open Rocket based approach. There's also more backstory on the name to come.
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