As I was inspecting a couple of our rockets last night and getting them ready for tomorrow's launch day, I noticed that the bottles were warped in a couple of places. It appears that the warping was most severe where the wide black tape was. This also occurred on the unpressurised sections of the rocket.
This was likely to have been caused during the last launch day when we left the rockets sitting out in the sun for a couple of hours. The heat absorbed by the tape was enough to shrink the bottles a little under the tape.
This is likely to occur to other rockets that are painted in dark colours. I think we will be storing our rockets in the shade from now on, and perhaps switch to lighter coloured tape when the black stuff runs out.
I spent most of the last couple of nights trying to get the Polaron IV main stage ready for flight on Saturday. The payload section now has the new FlyCamOne camera built in, the Z-log altimeter, servo motor, batteries and a newly built version of our flight computer (V1.3.2). I just have to attach the door and latch mechanism to the payload bay and then attach the whole thing to the rocket body.
We want to test fly it by itself to make sure all the systems and recovery works before we attach the boosters to it.
If we do get to fly it this weekend, I will post pictures soon after that.
______________________________________________
5 comments:
Do you think wraping black tape arond a bottle could be a cost effecive of heat shrinking ?
You probably would get very uneven results if you used tape and sun to try to shrink bottles. The heat wasn't enough to shrink the bottles a whole lot but just enough to distort the bottles.
A gas stove is much more effective at shrinking bottles quickly and evenly.
Post a Comment