Saturday, February 10, 2007

Its 2am the thrill is gone....

A number of knowledgeable people keep telling me to start fireing a Motor, any Motor to get experience with liquid rocket motors. This summer my son and his friend Jason built a test stand and rocket motor. I built the Injector Plate for it. Due to valve issues it was never run.
We have put new valves on it and its ready to test. Since our test site has a lot going on this weekend and we decided this would be the weekend. Alas everything takes longer than expected.
One minor example... I'm a founder at Netburner, so the electronics that runs the test stand is all based on Netburner modules. Well the sample code that I brought home this evening to use uses a relatively new NetBurner feature so the code release that is running on my laptop does not support it. So step one is download a large file and reinstall tools... It went down hill from there,I think were finally ready to go, but the garage looks like there was a tool explosion...

It's 2am and I get up in 4 hours, as the song says its 2am and the thrill is gone....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been there so many times myself. Good luck on your test firing ! See if you can grab a video of it to post.

Anonymous said...

So? How did it go Paul?

--- Carl

Paul Breed said...

Everything went perfectly, except the pyro igniter we were given by Mark.
The igniter fired the electric match, but failed to fire the main charge, as a result we got a no light.

All setup, fueling/filling, and valve operation were perfect. I have a video
and I will post it as soon as I figure out how to shorten it from 20 min to the interesting 20 second portion.