What "other" types of rockets have you launched?

Just to be clear, "other" means rockets that are not your typical LPR, MPR, HPR.
I'll start it off with old school stick and fuse bottle rockets, water rockets, baking soda and vinegar rockets, alka seltzer film canister rockets, air powered stomp rockets, and a propeller "rocket" made by air hogs.

I have used line-throwing rocket motors in high power rockets. Based on size and propellant mass I would estimate they were about I-class motors.

I had a Quercetti Mach X in my youth. You can still find them occasionally on ebay (I did!).


Amazingly intricate device for a toy, and it really worked. Set delay time with the little red tabs (right) that were attached to internal rubber bands. Foot on the launch pad, hook the double-handed sling to the two hooks at the top. Stretch the bands as far as you could reach---make sure it did NOT point toward your face!---and ease pressure on the pad. A hook at the bottom of the rocket would slide out of its slot and the thing would fling itself hundreds of feet up.

I've thought about making an upscale with a tall launching sling from 16' 2x4s and rubber exercise strips, or rig some kind of trebuchet for a launcher.

Best -- Terry

First rocket i saw was an arrow with a co2 cartridge filled with paper match heads.
I was about 6 some older kids launched it we all ran like hell no idea where it came down.

When I was a young Air Force officer I was the program manager for a small research program. In the end we did three runs on the USAF rocket sled at Holloman AFB. It was so long ago we had to chase the dinosaurs off the track before we did the tests. I remember we used an A-4 forebody for the tests and the rocket sled was powered by surplus Zuni rockets. I know, Navy stuff for an Air Force project. But R&D programs often beg for money and equipment so we used whatever we could scrounge. Our ejection seats were surplus too, but they worked well until we exceeded the operational envelope of the parachute on the final test. Surplus 400 knot parachutes can fail when tested at 450 knots. It was kinda ugly. Well, actually, it was pretty cool to watch the chute shred and our dummy impact the ground at high speed.

So Wikipedia says that the smallest version of the Zuni has 33,300 Newtons of thrust so that makes them O motors. I figure we used 20 of the rocket motors over the three tests, so I burned 666,000 Newtons of Zunis or the equivalent of an S motor.

I had a Quercetti Mach X in my youth. You can still find them occasionally on ebay (I did!).

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Toy rockets with parachute deployment are rare. Love the design of that rocket. I found a video of it here.
It's in Italian, but still interesting to watch.

I launched a old console TV on L-motor..... It was ugly.

CaptainVideo said:

Toy rockets with parachute deployment are rare. Love the design of that rocket. I found a video of it here.
It's in Italian, but still interesting to watch.

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Hah, I went out and found the same video. It seems like the Mach X as shown in prfesser's post has a more elaborate parachute timer and a more aggressive launcher than the one in that video. Unfortunately I can't find any video of the Mach X itself.

Very cool!

Did the match-head and foil rockets in junior high-ish. Bottle rockets and other firework rockets in high school. From middle-school onwards was also into Estes rockets so never tried anything too stupid. (We did launch an Alpha III out of a “silo” in the sandbox, sans launch rod).

blackjack2564 said:

I launched a old console TV on L-motor..... It was ugly.

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I like your style.

My kids have stomp rockets, which I can't help but step on now and then. And when I was a kid, I had one of those water rockets that was hand-held, and you had to pump it full of air and release it; then the air would force the water out through the nozzle and make it go up.

Also, my kids had a cheap toy rocket that flew on baking soda, citric acid and water, but it was so poorly designed that we threw it away after a few tries.

Almost forgot add a watermelon on K, now that was reeeeeal funny... just cut hole in it, put motor through large CR to prevent it from shoot through melon. Worked great for first 100 feet, after that.....fruit salad.

I had that Estes hydrogen power thing. My one and only attempt at using it was unsuccessful. It ended up in a Goodwill donation.

Let us not forget:

AGM-12 Bullpup, AGM-88 HARM, …..

Oh wait, not those kind. Never mind...

Here's a rocket-powered golf club (not mine though):

I did the rubber band powered Space Derby rockets as a kid in Cub Scouts. I even got a silver medal at one of the regional meets. That rocket is hiding somewhere in storage today.

neil_w said:

Hah, I went out and found the same video. It seems like the Mach X as shown in prfesser's post has a more elaborate parachute timer and a more aggressive launcher than the one in that video. Unfortunately I can't find any video of the Mach X itself.

Very cool!

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The one I have is somewhat brittle, and the rubber bands are dryrotted, otherwise I might try refurbishing it and flying it. Not surprising, it's 40-50 years old. The newer ones are more flexible plastic (I have one of those too) and they probably took the double-handled sling out of production because of kids hitting themselves in the face.

neil_w said:

Let us not forget:

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Totally awesome.

I did the typical packed match head and gunpowder rockets with mixed success. One that hasn't been mentioned here yet is a rocket-powered distress flare (flown only as a practice, never in earnest thank goodness). They go up to about 1000 feet and deploy a flare under a parachute which stays airborne for a minute or so. They're a heck of a lot more visible than the typical 12-gauge flares. They guy demo-ing them said that the rocket sometimes takes a 180-degree turn out of the handheld launcher and comes back at you. I suspect now that it has folding fins and sometimes one of them doesn't unfold.

Doesn't really count as a rocket, but when I was a kid, we would take an expired CO2 cartridge from a BB gun, cut the nozzle off of it with a hacksaw, stuff it full of paper match heads, stick three out of the back as a "fuse", stick the whole thing in a steel pipe, light the "fuse," and let 'er rip. Very exciting.

My first rocket, early 60's

Bat-mite said:

Doesn't really count as a rocket, but when I was a kid, we would take an expired CO2 cartridge from a BB gun, cut the nozzle off of it with a hacksaw, stuff it full of paper match heads, stick three out of the back as a "fuse", stick the whole thing in a steel pipe, light the "fuse," and let 'er rip. Very exciting.

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Scottrod said:

First rocket i saw was an arrow with a co2 cartridge filled with paper match heads.
I was about 6 some older kids launched it we all ran like hell no idea where it came down.

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I wonder, now, how we all learned about these kinds of foolhardy projects back in the days of mimeographs and rotary telephones?

I was in the crowd of bystanders when one of my middle school classmates tried that. No arrow, no pipe -- just the cartridge packed with the the potassium chlorate and sulfur scraped from a big box of kitchen matches.

No one was injured in the explosion but it made a heck of a bang. A long time later (maybe a week) somebody found part of the cartridge -- split and kind-of rolled inside-out at the ruptured edge -- on the next street over and brought it to school. We passed it around for most of the day before one of the teachers confiscated it and a bunch of us went to the principal's office for a version of the "you could have put your eye out!" lecture.

Other rockets:

Lots of rockets and rocket-like toys. My brother and I found the aluminum-foil-paper-match rocket in the Great International Paper Airplane Book and stunk up the house when I was maybe 7 years old. We had more than one water rocket set. I remember some kind of injection molded rocket-toy that came with something that looked like Alka Seltzer tablets and a rubber-stopper/launch pad that we never got to do anything except hiss and fall over -- google hasn't been useful in helping me find a picture of that toy...

I've manned the compressed air paper-dart launcher (not really rockets, but rocket-shaped projectiles) when our club has had a booth at the Maker Fair.

My kid has a burst-disk launcher, couple of stomp-rockets, two water rocket kits, and a home-made water rocket that we built from piece of fluorescent tube protector (the neighbors called the police we launched that one in a city park -- I think it was the "whoosh" sound that alarmed them)

jlabrasca said:

I wonder, now, how we all learned about these kinds of foolhardy projects back in the days of mimeographs and rotary telephones?

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I guess because we actually talked to each other.

WFWalby said:

My first rocket, early 60's

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I had a ton of those too... but my favorite was this one, which used citric acid powder mixed with water and sodium bicarbonate as the propellants. You put the powder in a well at the bottom, closed it up, turned it rightside up and put it on the launcher. After counting to 30 so the CO2 could build up, you pulled a string and the hook that held it on the launcher let go. They went impressively high... maybe 300'.

cerving said:

I had a ton of those too... but my favorite was this one, which used citric acid powder mixed with water and sodium bicarbonate as the propellants. You put the powder in a well at the bottom, closed it up, turned it rightside up and put it on the launcher. After counting to 30 so the CO2 could build up, you pulled a string and the hook that held it on the launcher let go. They went impressively high... maybe 300'.

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I remember those. A kid on my block had one we would play with.

I had the hand pumped and released water rocket, and never got it to work; the little rubber gasket on the pump where the rocket sat would always leak.

Fireworks, both stick type bottle rockets and larger ones with plastic molded fins.

I did the foil on a match ones, and really got pretty good with them for a while.

Aside from pressurized water rockets in the 1960s. I discovered a tiny rocket one could make with safety matches, tiny squares of tin foil, a pin, and a paper clip launcher...All outlined in The Great Paper Airplane Book from the 1970s.

RocketT.Coyote said:

Aside from pressurized water rockets in the 1960s. I discovered a tiny rocket one could make with safety matches, tiny squares of tin foil, a pin, and a paper clip launcher...All outlined in The Great Paper Airplane Book from the 1970s.

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jlabrasca said:

... My brother and I found the aluminum-foil-paper-match rocket in the Great International Paper Airplane Book and stunk up the house when I was maybe 7 years old.

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BBowmaster said:

Did the match-head and foil rockets in junior high-ish...

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jqavins said:

...
I did the foil on a match ones, and really got pretty good with them for a while.

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The original (just because I've got The Great International Paper Airplane Book in the case right behind my work table (indicia says 1967 -- almost as old as me <g>).




An improved version

prfesser said:

I had a Quercetti Mach X in my youth. You can still find them occasionally on ebay (I did!).

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Replying to a necro-thread here, I had to drop in after seeing this post in Google.

The Mach-X is an amazing bit of engineering. It's not entirely clear in the color image how it works, but you can see more in the upper left. The fuse is in two parts, hinged at the rear. There's a rubber band at the hinge that is always trying to pull it open, you can see the red pulley in the color image. There's also an arm, #16 in the upper left, that acts as a spring to provide extra force to push it open.

Keeping it closed is the long arm, #5. This has a finger on the end that fits into a sliding latch on the hinged half. There is a rubber band on the latch that attempts to slide rearward and unlock the door, and it has enough strength to force the long arm to rotate outward. To stop this from happening on the ground, there is a small hook, #6, that you hook onto the arm to stop it from rotating outward.

On launch, the wind presses on the fin at the end of the long arm and causes it to rotate inward to lie flat against the fuselage. This causes the hook to unlock. The wind keeps the arm pressed against the rocket until the speed falls off. At that point the spring arm #16 gets enough force to push the long arm outward and unlatch the door. The rubber band at the rear then keeps pulling it open, aided by airflow on the fins moulded into the top of the door.

The two red "plugs" you can see in the color image control the parachute deployment speed by changing the tension on the rubber bands. The fingers are on the one that tensions the opening pulley, moving it upward means more tension and thus faster opening. The upper one controls the tension on the latch, so adding tension here means the arm will open at a higher speed, and thus open while still going up. By lowering tension on both you can delay the opening and have a longer coast time.

It's really quite brilliant.