Notebook 2, August 1980 to February 1981

Second Notebook

August 1980 to February 1981

Every now and then I am tormented by a totally irrational urge to clean house.

Caught in the throes of a cleaning frenzy, I came across a box containing some of my old rocketry/pyrotechnic notebooks. Saved! I immediately abandoned cleaning, and relived some of my good old times. And scary old times.

Here are the scanned contents of the earliest one I found, which contains records of my rocketry and pyrotechnic experiments from August 1980 to February 1981.

Notable events during this period were my subscription to Pyrotechnica, and the subsequent contact with Chempack, a mail-order supplier of pyrotechnic chemicals, books, and equipment. I bought the Weingart and Lancaster texts, and a collection of chemicals to which I had never before had access. Thus I was able to experiment with a new range pyrotechnic mixtures, using well-established procedures.

In this book is one of my earliest descriptions of the making of recrystallized KNO3/sucrose propellant (pages 152-176) which I called "Caramel" and "fuel" at that time, not knowing any better. I had intended to submit this description to Robert Cardwell hoping it would be published in Pyrotechnica, but I never sent it in.

My good friend "D" gave me a Triple Beam scale, so I transitioned from using "grains" with my reloader's scale, to a much more rocket-friendly "grams." For added confusion, I used the letter "g" for "grains" in the beginning, and for "grams" toward the end. This transition occurs on 10/30/80, although you may see occasional references to "grains" after that - especially in the description of the process for making propellant, which I had started writing earlier.

1 gram= 15.43 grains.

I used a lot of abbreviations in this book, some of which are not clear even to me.

Here are the ones I remember:

Ig - Ignition. Whatever happens after the thing gets lit.
HDALF - Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil
4LHDF - four layers of heavy duty foil
Nzl - Nozzle
NzlS - Nozzle seal - usually several layers of aluminum foil pressed over the nozzle opening.
PBC - Pressed Bentonite Clay. Rammed, actually, but I did not know that term back then.
GP - Grain Perforation. I had independently discovered the "uninhibited core-burning grain" which I called a "perforated pellet," and my motors improved dramatically. GP is the diameter of the core.
3FBP - FFF Black powder
TC- Top Charge - whatever fires after the rocket motor burns out. I took up pyrotechnics to make more interesting top charges, mostly colored stars.
3 Sheet, Titebond glued - three sheets of copy paper used to make a tube. Glued with diluted Titebond.
FC - Fuel Charge - the grain of propellant in the motor.

You may note some "errors" in my terminology:
Fuel - means propellant. Most folks I knew were using the term "fuel" to mean "propellant" back then.
Caramel - A bit of a misnomer, but taken from the Brinley book and other sources, where the sugar and KNO3 were melted together. When properly made, my propellant was a light ivory color, barely caramelized at all.

Unfortunately, book 1 was not in the box and is as yet unfound. It covered the original experiments making recrystallized KNO3/sucrose, which I had first tried in 1977. By the time notebook 2 was started, I had standardized the recrystallization procedure, and had developed some crude but functional "C" and "D" class rocket motors using it the resulting propellant.

Click on one of the large thumbnails below to bring up a readable version. Each page as a "Next" and "Previous" link at the top to assist scrolling from page to page.

Clicking "Thumbnails" at the bottom of any page will return to this page.
There is a crude Table of Contents starting on page 219

Jimmy Yawn
jyawn@sfcc.net
May 4, 2011

Second Notebook

August 1980 to February 1981

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