I've always loved space and rocketry stuff, and at one point tried to build a rocket or two of myown design. Unfortunately I lacked both expertise and materials; you can see the results in these AVI digital videos.
There are two rocketry AVIs to see so far; one is short, of a stubby, little rocket, and the other is somewhat longer, of a large, fierce rocket.
Small rocket, small flick.
Large rocket, longer flick. With groovy sound track by the Andrea True Connection
We lit it from the bottom, and the flame came out the top.
Small rocket clip (about a second, 237,880 bytes)
This is my senior chemistry project, from high school. Because my partners on the project were just using my rocketry work so they could get an easy grade, and were doing less than nothing to help, I slacked off too and never developed a way to fix the fuel in anything better than its natural powdered form. The result you can see in this brief AVI.
I've excised everything but the launch from this video clip. If I hadn't, you would have seen my friends clutching their hands to themselves in protection from the near-zero degree cold and screaming wind; it was the coldest March day I can remember. Because of their manner of protecting their hands from the wind, you might have thought they were trying to pee, when in fact they were just trying to hook up the ignition battery.
...and the villagers chased us with many torches...
Larger rocket clip (about 15 seconds, 580,778 bytes; film was originally shot with a Kodak Super-8 millimeter box camera (chemical film, that is), modified with a much larger electric motor and powered by a lantern battery (which was a little low in voltage, as it turned out, reducing what would have been a very high frame rate and very slow motion); the Super-8 reel that resulted was transferred to SVHS and VHS videotape formats much later, and from VHS to AVI using the video capture card described on the superordinate page)
We didn't have time to make a decent rocket before I went off to college, but we did try: Using a cast iron "blast plug" at the top both for weight in the nose and to keep the flame heading in the right direction, we made a much larger rocket, this time of aluminum tubing. To avert the danger of too much pressure within the tube, we used a venturi (nozzle) with only about 2:1 reduction in cross-sectional area from its widest to its narrowest point. For ease of fabrication with rivets, we made tapered fins of the same tubing as the rocket body was made from. Because of the cross section they presented to the wind, we called them "cookie cutter" fins. They were easy to make and easy to align, as well as to attach, while at the same time they offered a very large cross-sectional area to the wind, putting the (head-to-tail) center of drag very far aft of the center of mass, which the aforementioned 'blast plug' moved quite far forward; together these afforded ideal flight stability.
Unfortunately, the fuel was still in powdered form.
We covered the nozzle up with a plastic kitchen wrap to keep it from falling out. But we were foiled again! Since the fuel took a lot of heat to ignite, again we pointed an Estes toy rocket engine up into it from below to get it started.
While this would part the plastic wrap easily enough, it also hurled the big rocket up the launch rail forcefully without igniting the fuel inside; the big rocket slid up and out of the blast flame the Estes D12-5 engine was putting out, only to settle back down onto it and be hurled back up again without igniting.
At this instant the D12-5's thrust cuts out, allowing the big rocket to plop back down onto the base of the pad a little more quickly (making its motion up and down something other than rhythmic). Throughout the sequence, little bits of the fuel are igniting: Zinc and sulfur (the big rocket's fuel) burns bright lime green-to-white like a day-glo tennis ball; aluminum burns blue; and the other stuff burns orange-red to white.
A blast cone emerges from the nozzle at a few places on the film, at a very wide angle, showing the relative inefficiency of the wide nozzle (as we had planned it). Interestingly, the rocket is not propelled upwards by this blast cone, suggesting that either very little fuel is creating it, or that the design really stinks for propulsion.
Eventually (very shortly in real time, this film having been shot with a slow-motion camera) there's a big explosion-- BINGO!-- not what we were looking for, since this was supposed to be a rocket. In fact, the center of the explosion is behind the rocket-- as if the rocket has dumped its fuel out the back as it was bouncing up and down.
With all this bouncing going on, I picked a bouncy soundtrack to go with it: a disco song called "More, More, More" by that sexy Andrea True and her Andrea True Connection.