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First Micro Engine-Powered WAEC Rocket |
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WAEC Rockets Space Racer SAM-66 Sunbird II Pi Sprint Leviathan Space Racer II Arcturus Mk. 1 Roswell or Bust! Brinley Short March Discovery XW-1 Apollo-LES Sprint II Lone Star Mercury-Redstone Shenzhou Saturn 1B Saturn V Gemini-Titan II Juno I Chrysler Building More Information |
From the moment I heard that Quest had released tiny rocket engines, called "Micro Maxx," or QMX for short, I envisioned fantastic potential for making impressive miniature rockets. Stacked on top of each other, they would make two-stagers that would doubtless be easy to lose. I could mount an ordinary QMX rocket that looked like a WAC Corporal on top a scale V-2 to make an excellent Bumper. And, with an ingenious means of ignition, I could even make a tiny cluster rocket. I only began to explore the possibilities. I got my hands on four "T-MM" body tubes, made by Aerospace Specialty Products to fit around a QMX engine. I wanted a simple design concept on which to base a simple model to gain experience with building tiny rockets. I had had for a while a book called Rocket Manual For Amateurs, the cover of which portrays a generic orange and black rocket with a width of about 6 mm, the same diameter as T-MM tubing. Perfect! The book itself is worth further mention, since it provided much of my inspiration for rocketry experimentation, although I did not understand a good portion of it. It was written by Captain Bertrand R. Brinley, U.S. Army, published 1960 by Ballantine Books. My first copy (I now have two) proudly proclaims that it's an original, not a reprint. This fascinating book discusses amateur rocketry, which is the sort of thing that Homer Hickam and the rocket boys did while it was still somewhat legal. As a site note, Brinley (the author) also worked in theater and wrote a series of books called the Mad Scientists' Club. One can find a brief biography of him here. In November of 2000, I drafted plans for a rocket of the exact size and shape of the rocket on the cover of the book. Since I didn't feel like building the rocket at that very moment, I shoved the plans into the WAEC files and forgot about them for a year. This was actually a wise move: when I returned to the file a year later to build this rocket, I had learned more, and had some better ideas on how to go about building such a rocket. I replaced some of the rather archaic construction techniques I had planned with more advanced ones I had since learned. I began construction of Brinley (as I named it after the author of the book) in October 2001, and finished it the next month. I likely could have completed it much more quickly had I tried, but I had other things to distract me, namely schoolwork and attempting (and failing) to get a book of mine published. My schoolwork seemed to get completed with reasonable success, but the attempts to get my book published were abysmal at best. When I finally went to launch Brinley, the month of November was winding to a close, and I still hadn't launched a single rocket for the month. We had recently enjoyed a good snowfall (by the standards of Boulder, Colorado), and the atmospheric temperature was something like -10 degrees Celcius, which made it very hard to launch rockets. The first day I attempted a shot of Brinley, I wore a large amount of clothing and went to a small flying field (closer to my house than my main one, but smaller), but I couldn't get it to fly. The same was the story the next day. I began to suspect that fate was pitting itself against me so that I wouldn't fly any rockets that month. I considered staging a still-life photo shoot of Brinley and a citrus fruit, entitled "Two Lemons". But the rocket wasn't the problem. I ought to have inspected our leading cause of failure for the launch: dead batteries. That of course was the problem. Of course, I didn't think of that until the third day of launch attempts. On Thursday, November 29, 2001, little Brinley flew from my backyard, giving me my monthly black powder fix . It was about time. I continued the test program of Brinley for three more flights, once from my backyard, once from the smaller park where I had intended to launch it at first, and once beside the highway in the vicinity of White Sands Missile Range. On the first of these flights, Brinley dashed itself on some of our landscaping rocks and broke off a fin. I had little trouble reparing that damage. Brinley was not much of an educational experience. My grand visions for fleets of miniature rockets of all descriptions came to nothing. Brinley did not leave an impressive lineage, since it was followed by only one other original Micro Maxx design, the lackluster Short March. But, it was entertaining to build and fly, and I suppose that is all the justification I need. Brinley Specifications:
Length: 18 cm Core Diameter: 6 mm (BT-MM) Engine Mount: 6 mm Nose: Ogive Recovery: Separation Stabilization: Clipped-delta fins (4) Number of Flights: 4 Brinley Photographs
image: The cover
illustration for Rocket Manual for
Amateurs, which served as the inspiration for this rocket.image, image: Two views of the rocket before the third launch of the prototype, on January 27, 2002. Brinley Flight Log
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by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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