Hairspray Rockets are composed of three bits, no individual bit is a hs rocket. The most time consuming stage in their manufacture is rubbing the heads of the matches. The quickest way I've found to do this is to twist them off with you fingers but this gave me a fiercesome blister on the side of my finger, the next quickest way is to crush the head with the side of a knife. I had a stroke of genius the other day and soaked a big box's worth of matches in a pickle jar, shook it until all the heads fell of, filtered the head material out with a coffee filter and then dried the brown goo to find to my disappointment this head material was no longer flammable.

The sparker consists of a sparker and a long length of two strand wire. The sparker used was orginally the sparker from a piezoelectric cigarette lighter, it was mounted in the obvious way across the wire. Now I use one of those piezoelectric gas oven sparkers, again, by taking it apart and replacing some wire inside with the end of one strand of the two strand wire this gas ligher is mounted across the wire.

The rocket body is illustrated to the left. It is simple. All that is needed is a Cresta bottle and a bit of a Cresta bottle and some works, meaning sellotape and sissors and stuff. Cresta is a very cheap type of lemonade that comes in 2l plastic bottles, the word Cresta is probabely geographically determined, the concept almost certainly isn't. Obvious after trying the basic Cresta bottle design, you could replace the Cresta bottle with, for example, two Cresta bottles araldited together or, for example, a 6 gallon fermentation drum. For the sake of sweet jesus, don't use glass anything.

The blasting cap is illustrated above and this describes its construction. It is made from a short length of two strand wire, a flash bulb from one of those banks of disposable flash bulbs, some match heads, tissue, araldite and a Cresta top. The Treatise on Blasting Caps promised some time ago is this. Use plenty of match heads, as little tissue paper as possible and don't tape the tissue paper beyond the top of the flash bulb.

Now to launch, or if you prefer, fire, a hs rocket, lighly bung the hole at the bottom. Then, fill the rocket a third full with water and attach it to a launch pole, or attach it to the launch pole and fill it a third full of water, it doesn't much matter. Spray in a one and half squirts of hs. The notation of a squirt is I think well defined, it is the amount of hs that comes out if you push down the nozzle but don't hold it down. Pause and then screw on the blasting cap. Attach the wire from the blasting cap to the wires from the sparker in such a way the the will detach during launching while the rocket is still sliding up the launch pole. Stand well back, make sure everyone is standing well back.

The rocket should make a whoosh sound. If it makes a bang noise there wasn't enough hs, if it doesn't make any noise, there was too much hs or not enough match heads. If it actually explodes, as opposed to merely fracturing the base, please email me, you are obviously doing something usefull wrong, I've never managed an explosion with a 1-bottle rocket.

Future improvements might involve getting rid of vlad stuff completely, using steel wool and a battery instead of flashbulbs and a sparker and adding a second stage. Maybe lighter gas would work better than hs, maybe calcium carbide might be used to make ethylene in the bottle and be better again.

This is http://rocket.tc
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