My 1st Project: Centering Rings For A Model Rocket Motor Mount

[John Simmons]

Just wanted to share a fun project I did today... I'm waiting for my Robert Sorby wood turning tools to arrive.

If this thread is deemed inappropriate for this forum feel free to delete it, no worries.

One of my other hobbies is designing and scratch building model rockets. I needed to modify some centering rings (1/8" balsa plywood) by turning down their OD's. I was thinking about how to do this and thought I'd give it a go on my wood lathe.

It just so happened that the counter bore in the back of the face plate was the perfect size to engage in the paper body tube mandrel.

No way I could have free hand sanded the O.d.'s of these without the lathe.. they're just to thin.

The more tools you have, the easier projects are.

I've attached a couple drawings, along with some photo's.



And the drawings that give some insight into what the rings are for..

 

[Mike Johnson]

John,

I have made various tools and apparatus for making solid fuel rockets and various other pyrotechnic devices for about a decade. The company I work for manufactures a large number of products one of them being Erythritol which can be used to make a solid fuel for model rockets, we sell a large amount of this to a model rocket builder in Iowa that makes some large scale solid fuel rockets that he launches in the Nevada desert each year. When I had more free time I used to do a monthly club outing where we would build and launch a variety of pyrotechnic items. Rockets were one of my favorite items.

 

[Bill Boehme]

Very nice work, John. Also, welcome to the AAW forum. The strapped motors reminds me of the type of boosters used by the Soviets during the space race in the sixties. While the US designed and built ever increasingly large staged boosters, the Soviets took the low budget approach of simply strapping a bunch of smaller boosters together. The company that I worked for built the Scout launch vehicle that was designed to mainly inject satellites into lower Earth orbits. We also built parts of the space shuttle and ISS.