Tracking and locating

watheyak said:

Dangit, a safety zealot scared him off. This was a fascinating look into a rarely seen hobby. Their safety procedures were none of the zealot’s business anyway.

I work in an industry that has more safety related regulations than any other by far. In that I’ve learned that it’s possible to get so wrapped up in silly details and perceived safety injustices that you lose sight of the big picture. This is what has happened here.

And the Bacon Locator should be patented.

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Well, if you think I'm a safety zealot, then you must have a very low opinion of the NAR. In which case, perhaps you should consider another hobby, since they are our governing body.

The OP came back today, after I posted briefly.

While not a NAR member, I do however have a great opinion of the NAR, their safety code and NFPA 1127. They work great and are quite sufficient.

What I have a problem with is people interjecting their irrational fears into something they know nothing about, trying to put a halt to someone’s enjoyment of their hobby.

watheyak said:

While not a NAR member, I do however have a great opinion of the NAR, their safety code and NFPA 1127. They work great and are quite sufficient.

What I have a problem with is people interjecting their irrational fears into something they know nothing about, trying to put a halt to someone’s enjoyment of their hobby.

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If you read the post I was simply curious about the hobby. Where is there any mention about halting what he is doing? I'll be waiting.....

kuririn said:

I'll be waiting.....

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Noted.

Still waiting...

Guys please stop bickering and provide meaningful information to track a bowling ball.

Yup, you're right Andrew. Refer to my posts #18 and 20.

The halting people’s hobbies comment was out of line, and I’m sorry. I had edited that portion out, but not before you quoted it, so I added it back as not to appear a revisionist.

Bacon solved it, as it usually does.

If OP returns I have two curious/nosy questions. First one: what kind of shape are the recovered bowling balls generally in? Second one: that’s a nice looking field ya got there, is any Rocketry permitted there?

OP might be interested in this thread:
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/arduino-controlled-altimeter-for-cannonball.144188/
But instead of an Arduino altimeter an Arduino tracker. Of course, don't know if the circuits and components can survive the blast.
EDIT: Is it just me, or does anyone else find it strange that there are TWO questions regarding cannon balls from new members within days of each other? Coincidence?

Not sure exactly what is being measured but anything that you put on that drags out the back end is likely to change if not the trajectory at least the distance the ball travels.

Any chance of putting in a powder charge and filling the bowling ball with powdered fluorescent colored chalk? Set the fuse so the thing goes off after the thing already lands. Shoots a big cloud of chalk dust out the finger holes. Visually you may be able to spot the cloud of chalk dust coming out when the bowling ball hits and likely would make it big mark on the area when you go search for it. Might work well with a drone.

May not work however if the ball gets buried up to its depth in dirt

Wallace said:

Change the title of your video above from "Beacon test" to "Bacon test". Stuff the finger holes with bacon and use the dog as a tracker/locator...

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In the early days at White Sands, they used dogs to track the parts of crashed rockets...so the bacon idea is great, it’s been done in a similar manner.

https://www.wsmr-history.org/Dogs.htm

I wasn't kidding about using the dog/garmin, the bacon was a takeoff on the beacon test that I couldn't pass up. That in hindsight would probably work pretty well....OP already apparently has the dog, would just need a dog tracker if he needs coordinates for distance verification. Would be more costly initially but probably huge savings over time due to trashed bowling ball borne electronics, probably due more to landing Gee's?

And "Squalene" is probably just WD40...

Wallace said:

And "Squalene" is probably just WD40...

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Hand moisturizer. Too many carbon atoms to be WD40.

Something this forum does is send you notices when some one post to your topic. I see folks who have a genuine interest in helping and not question my sanity. Since only one person is critical and the rest interested in helping...I don't think he is a safety zealot, rather he is uninformed about my hobby.

Although I did address most of the questions the gentleman posed about safety. I missed a couple.

Bowling balls are as obtainable as a visit to the local bowling alley. Just stop in and ask for old or abandoned balls, bring a wheelbarrow.

Standing 10 feet away and pulling friction fuse with a lanyard. YouTube is full folks posting cannon video's who light a foot of green cannon fuse then run like the devil to await the gun to go pop! I belong to a group people who build cannons to shoot . We have two unwritten rules. 1. Don't build the gun safe enough for you, build it safe enough for the next guy to shoot it. 2. If you can not stand beside your cannon when you fire it, it is not safe to shoot. You do not need to run and hide from these guns. The whole purpose is to use antique ignition. This gun replicate a British 8 inch siege mortar on a traveling carriage and was fired by lanyard and friction primer. To be clear electric ignition is a antique ignition system-pre 1898, just not for this gun.

This mortar has an outside barrel diameter of 11 inches. The breech plug is 9 inches in diameter and the chamber in the breech plug is 3 inches diameter. Safety rules specify a one caliber wall thickness over the powder chamber. The powder chamber is 3 inches so one caliber would be 3 inches, my wall is 4 inches. The minimum standard steel in a cannon other than an original for seamless steel tubing and that is 1018 steel. The breech plug is 4140. The tube is a surplus piece of steel from the manufacture a refinery reactor vessel. I was some sort of custom alloy that exceed the properties of 4140. I have the report buried somewhere in my files.

This picture shows one of the bowling balls i am trying to locate. That is. one pound of GOEX Cannon grade Black powder.




Now for the other Ideas and Questions.

First the bacon Idea. It is a no go. I had a stent put in my heart three years ago. I was put on a heart friendly diet and that says no bacon. My wife is very strict about his and won't let have anything do with bacon. Now is bacon is so bad for me why is it okay for her to eat it. Any a different issue, bottom line no bacon for me.


I answered the question about charge above, for this project i am attempting to determine how far down range will one pound of black powder send a 15 lb bowling ball. I am also trying determine a 1 mile charge. The longest verify charge fires so far is 8 ounce when sent the ball 650 yards. Normal shooting 100 to 500 yards. The small cannon use charges measured in grains. My golf ball mortar uses 24 grains for 30 yards. My one inch cannons use 180 to 200 grains for round ball shooting at targets 50 to 100 yards away.

Where to one of these guns. I designed and built this mortar myself, some of the work had to be contracted out. Boring the barrel and turning the breech wase to big for my lathe so i had a friend do it for me. I can cut and drill the metal hardware, but I am no welder, so again farmed out to friends. I can add a link to the build over on the cannon board if you wish. The build was started in 2011 and the build thread has over 600 post in it. Right now I am still finishing some trim addressing some issue that cropped up in early firing. The goal was to launch a bowling ball one mile. I have far exceeded that, I just can't prove it. That is why I have come to you guys for help with cheap telemetry. I need to verify my distance. Part of that is safety most of is curiosity.

I won't get into the politics of black powder, but I will tell you if you can find who has it, you can get it. One pound is probably as close as your nearest Bass Pro shop. You can have it drop shipped from distributors.

Tell me about tiles, how do they work?

I should say that once I determine how far my ball is going on one pound of powder them that is probably the last time I shoot that for. I won't have a need for trackers after that. The fun in shooting these things is to see the ball fly and land. Like model rockets. For me when i have seen them fly as long as you can see the smoke trail and you can see the parachute deploy they are fun. The rockets I watched go out sight, for me were ho-hum after the first three or four.

No to any pyrotechnic on the ball on the ground. If I set fire the the 25,000 acres of barley field the farmer has, he will close the gate to me. And those of you who drink beer will cuss me for increase in price as result. Yes you might be able get access for rocketry. winds would be an issue. When firing these long shots we could see the ball drift to the east with the prevailing ground winds, then at the top of the trajectory suddenly veer and go west. The Farm is 25 miles from Cut Bank, MT a long way for most places.

Kevlar thread, a spool 3 miles long might drag a bit to much. Drag on the wallet also. Then there is pickup after the shot. Nope, and already considered.

We have used the dayglo paint and found black ball are easier track in flight and find on the ground, Better contrast. As long as the ball doesn't bury itself in the ground, if you know the impact area then the metal detector is needed. Metal detector won't find bowling balls.



Bowling balls are usually recover intact. Once in a while when a ball hits hard ground they break, usually the newer plastic ones. The old black one don't break as often.

Additional problem with pyrotechnic such as smoke and chalk is this is happen two to three miles away and might not be seen. This idea has pretty much be ruled out.

I am watching that other bowling ball thread, thank you.

Hum Squalene oil! What a great Idea! Wow. If the dog didn't find wait until the next day and look for the coyotes. Brilliant!

Sorry for the long winded reply, I was going through and responded to each remark. They all were appreciated and required a response.
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I knew you rocket guys would come up with the answer. Squalene! Thank you!

Wow, a whole pound of BP. That's about a two or three year's supply for most of us in rocketry...

What a nice man...

Teddy

DDickens,
I’m just down the interstate from you in Butte.
The reason I mentioned Tiles is because they’re cheap, compared to most rocket trackers. You can buy them in 4 packs for $100 or singly for a little higher unit price. They talk to an application on your smart phone. Unfortunately you have to be within 100 feet of them before your phone can talk to them. Once your phone establishes communication you can see it on a map on your phone (this is my understanding from reading the blurb; I don’t have one) or push a button on the app and the Tile starts sounding off.
There’s a copy of the Tile that’s even less expensive called a Cube:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014LBW3TY/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

Others have already told you about the audio beepers. Of course the same thing is true; you have to be somewhat close to first detect them.
If you really want to track it in flight and see a location before you let go of your pull starter, one of the trackers others have mentioned should be good. For price the Eggfinder (assembly required) is probably the lowest. The transmitter alone is $70-$75 depending on whether you pick the regular or the mini. The Mini would almost drop right into a finger hole if the hole were deeper.
Otherwise there are radio beepers that you RDF to using a receiver with a directional antenna, like the spy movies of fifty years ago. I have a transmitter for one and can probably borrow a receiver or if you want to bring your cannon to our launch site some of the members would have some of the other kinds of trackers. I have an Eggfinder that I haven’t built yet and a couple other kinds of trackers. But our launch site isn’t as nice and flat as the Cut Bank area.

This sounds interesting... How small would the device need to be? What are the sizes of the existing finger holes? Could you drill a new hole to mount something? Can you tape a wire antenna to the outside or does it need to be fully contained? I'm assuming you want to track from the launch site? Is there an intermediate range that would be useful? 100ft? 100 yards? 1/2 mile? I'd be interested in working on something like this. I think we could all use an inexpensive tracker.

Russ

Teddy are you using the same black powder I do such a FFFFG or something else other the G grades like Fb or Fa types?

Steve, I just moved from Montana to Oklahoma. Butte would have been in striking range.

We prefer 4f powder (ffffg). 3f works okay too.
Bummer about you moving before I got a chance to see this.

I think the tiles use the GPS location in the phone that detects them. You know if the phone has linked to the tile it is within a radius of about 100', based on BT technology. Buried in the ground this radius could be smaller and more difficult to hit as you walk past. If you have a lot of people searching and they have the app on their phone it might turn up easier.

I like the dog and bacon grease or oil idea.

Painting 1/2 of the ball gold or silver and leaving rest black may give you best of both worlds for flight tracking and ground finding.

Wild idea, drizzle some fluorescent paint on outside just before launch, may leave a splotch trail when it hits and rolls. Probably most of the paint will just come off in flight. Be colorful, though!

Any chance of setting up a camera down range that may be able to see where it landed, giving you a second reference point?

Another idea would be a far lateral spotter, well outside potential trajectory. Set up a viewer porthole and the a stick a few feet away that marks visualized landing site, so you have an angle on it.

When we have rockets land in fields, I try to be a bit away lateral from the launch area. Having two different spotters from slightly different angles, AND having the rocket seeker on a cell phone (works amazingly better than shouting and waving arms!), helps vector the seeker in from different angles. In this case we are only looking a few hundred yards.

Glow in the dark paint? Fire it in the morning and let it soak in all those wondrous UV rays all day. Go to the far ridge and look for the glowing hole in the ground.

Better yet....paint it with polonium. A Geiger counter will take you right to it!

For kevlar thread and a streamer, the idea is just to anchor it in the tube such that the fuse causes it to come out right before impact. Ideally that would leave you with 5-10ft of hi vis ribbon hanging above ground / on the grass.

I reckon an RDFtracker with an audio beacon that can handle the accelerations and fit in a thumb hole of a bowling ball is doable. You'd certainly get a frequency shift at the moments of firing and impact due to acceleration. Real time telemetry in flight would be difficult to get use from. I seriously doubt a GPS would hold lock in flight.

As others have mentioned, some old school rocket recovery techniques would probably help a lot too. An arrow on a stand behind the mortar that someone aligns with the flight of the ball means that that someone can guide you by radio along the correct path. This would certainly get you close enough for RDF to work regardless of the state of the antenna on the ball.

DDickens said:

Teddy are you using the same black powder I do such a FFFFG or something else other the G grades like Fb or Fa types?

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For our purposes in rocketry 4f black powder is best..
Some have a bit of difficulty getting 4f,,
that is the most common reason 3f or anything else is used..
I am in Cabelas every now and again, so I have no problem getting 4f,,
that's all I have ever used..

Teddy