Home Made Water Rockets! (2007)

How it all worked

The launch pad was rather crude, but it worked and it was cheap. We used a length of 22mm diameter plastic pipe, which cost £2, a pipe bend which cost £3, and some old wood which I found in the garden. To hold the pipe in place we used some more bits of wood and a clamp, again dead simple, but it did it's job.

At the other end of the pipe we had a cork with an old Presta valve from a dead inner tube shoved through it. With enough gaffa tape this stayed in for long enough to launch the rockets, it had a tendency to shoot out once the pressure got up to 3 bars (40 psi), but usually the rocket launched at about 2/2.5 bars (30 psi). We're hoping to think of a better solution for when we try this again, and increase the pressures.

Future Plans

We hope to try and increase the heights the rockets reach, so the next time we try I hope to knock up a simple angle view finder thing, to measure the angle between a known point and the apex of the rocket's flight. That way with a bit of simple trig we can work out it's height fairly accurately.

I also need to find a better pump attachment than a cork, and a working release mechanism so we can fill the bottle with a much higher pressure before deciding when we want to launch it. If we can perfect this then we might even go as far as to try some sort of 2 stage rocket, which would be absolutely brilliant.