High powered rocket engines made from PVC pipe

High powered rocket engines made from PVC pipe

For as much as we enjoy rockets, explosives, and other dangerous things, we haven’t said a word about the works of [Richard Nakka] . He’s the original hacker rocketeer with thousands of words dedicated to the craft of making things move straight up really fast. One of his more interesting builds is his series on building rocket engines out of PVC pipe written in conjunction with [Chuck Knight]. For the propellent grains, the PVC rocket didn’t use the usual potassium nitrate and sugar mixture of so many homebrew solid rockets. Instead, it uses Sorbitol, an artificial sweetener. While melting and casting the Sorbitol-based propellant grains is much easier than a sugar-based concoction, the Sorbitol had much less thrust than a typical sugar rocket, making it the perfect candidate for a PVC engine. For those of you wondering about the strength of a PVC engine casing, [Richard]...

Full article: http://hackaday.com/2013/03/01/high-powered-rocket-engine...