ALL Carbon Fiber: My Fastest, Highest, Craziest Rocket YET!

all right we are T-minus 15 minutes on my launch of spite the biggest fastest rocket I have ever made [Music] Jesus Christ This is actually I only decided I was gonna build her about three weeks ago well no I decided I wanted to build her probably like 10 months ago when I was at a rocket event helping a bunch of my friends and uh this lady wouldn't let me be in the group picture because I was the pr girl and I hated that because I was like there as engineering support and anyway I left that event being like screw this I want to build a all-carbon minimum diameter rocket that just like pushes my limits it flexes a little bit and it's gonna be all motor it's gonna go really fast and really high and so meet spite she's flying an m2080 skid mark and projected to go to 22 000 feet at Mach 2. see how it goes [Music] I had three big goals with this rocket I wanted to break Mach 2 and 20 000 feet digital and just shy of three weeks and the last one is a new one for me maintain some kind of work-life balance during the build meaning I'm not skipping the things that keep me sane like hiking and climbing and seeing friends and that means making a really strict launch campaign calendar and sticking to it 10 out of 10 recommends that as a first step anyway the first big build step was laying out the carbon fiber for my fins I decided to make my own for two equally good reasons one is that the dimensions I needed in dragon plate were hundreds of dollars I didn't really want to spend and the second was that Joe from BPS space and I were chatting really late one night and he said and I quote true hot girl is laying up your own fin plates I've literally never seen anyone do that and so here we are and for those of you unfamiliar with internet racketry culture I feel the need to clarify that hot girl should applies to any and all rockets that goes Zoom really really fast and has actually nothing to do with the gender or appearance of the people making the Rockets anyway to make sure that my plates are perfectly flat I laid them out on a piece of glass I definitely didn't steal from my outdoor table and once the spider webs were cleaned off I painted it with some mold release and it's time to grab that bottle tote resin and get to mixing and I want to point out I just confirmed a total about that to their knowledge I'm the first person to fly their epoxy supersonic so I really feel like I deserve a cookie or something for that but please drop a comment if you beat me to it I won't send you a cookie but maybe they will like with every layup I ever do I'm using a two to one high performance resin but for this I'm going to use medium hardener since it's actually got the highest tensile flexural and compressive strength of the three available hardeners and since I'm going to be mounting my tip tip layup directly against the fin plates I don't want it to be smooth like the glass and so I laid down some peel ply to give it a flat bondable texture instead and then I did a really standard wet lab over that just like I've done like a million times on this channel so once all the layers were down I added another sheet of Peel ply some plastic to keep it from sticking and then a flat surface I weighed down with sandbags and left it for the weekend while I took the teardrop trailer camping uh it really is that simple if you get anything from this channel I hope it's that Composites really aren't that hard and you can absolutely DIY it and save a ton of money and also be a hot girl while putting your mess into a sexy rocket and letting it on fire is certainly an option that I support more than that I support the responsible option which is therapy and that's why I'm excited to tell you about today's sponsor better help I personally use therapy for everything from navigating hard work decisions to relationships and making Life Choices I find it wildly useful to have an impartial professional to bounce ideas off of share my feelings with and dissect them and then decide how I'm going to proceed in a healthy way for me therapy isn't just for you if you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety we are all humans who live in a complicated and changing world and therapy can give you tools to navigate your life in a healthier happier way better Hope's mission is to make therapy more affordable and more accessible and this is an important Mission because finding a therapist can be really really hard especially when you're limited to options in your area betterhelp is an online platform designed to make finding a remote therapist Easier by matching you to a professional therapist in as little as a few days based on a few questions you answer when you sign up go to betterhelp.com xylone to both support this Channel and get 10 off your first month instead of health and because find me a therapist is a little like dating if you don't really fit with that therapist which is super common in therapy you can easily switch to a therapist for free without stressing about insurance using your network or anything like that thank you again better help for supporting this channel [Music] all right moment of truth I was making glossy not bad though and with my Jeep DIY carving plate in hand I ran over to my uh slightly less cheap and slightly less DIY tour Moxie and sea machine to cut these fins out in all seriousness though a huge thank you to tormach for working with this Channel and providing me this machine because damn look at those fins to make the fin jig I cut and laminated some MDF panels together and ran that block over to the CNC and I've actually never seen anyone use this design before but basically I cut out a half circle that is the diameter of my rocket tube minus like half of the width of the fins and that should give me a perfect like 90 degree layup before I could actually show gluing any of the fins down though I had to first cut the body tube down to size just so I wasn't wrangling more tube than I really need to and also do all of the bond prep on both the fins and the body tube and that's just like a fancy word for saying that I sanded it and once I'm done sanding I generally clean up with IPA and unfortunately I'm not talking about the fun stuff I'm talking about isopropyl alcohol and alas sometimes the perfect clamping fixture requires drilling holes in your perfectly good saw horses we gotta do what we gotta do once I had everything exactly where I wanted it then I could go mix some epoxy and get ready to actually root bond this thing the keto root bonding is to get the fins perfectly straight like none of these glue joints actually have to be structural that's what the fillets are for later but what I need to do particularly with this fin Jig Is make sure that those fins are clamped down as flat as they possibly can be and once those two are cured I could flip it 90 degrees cut another hole in my perfectly good saw horse and poke the fins through the fin jig and glue the next set on at 90 degrees [Music] all right I'm here to brag this is some hot girl energy right here okay so we're at zero degrees on this fin zero degrees on the body tube if we go over to this fin oh you probably can't really see that you can start with zero degrees that is perfectly straight go go I am stoked this looks so good like I've seen a lot of rockets in this stage and this is better not screw it up from here that'd be really sad for the fillets I started by masking off the bomb surfaces and yes I'm using popsicle sticks as a spacer they're like they're right with give me a break um and then I took a dance break of course the most important part carefully sanded them and then wipe them all down with alcohol and for my bonds and fillets I'm using thick Soap by bottle toad it's their super easy to use fiberglass reinforced epoxy and my favorite part is that it doesn't sag so you can rotate the fin can and do them all at once instead of waiting for it to cure in between like you do with rocket epoxy [Music] no no [Music] in every other video on my channel you've seen me dye all my fillets fun colors and sparkles which helps me keep track of batches and cure times but unfortunately since I'm not painting this rocket I had to dye all the batches black so they blend in and look Sleek with that really sexy carbon fiber [Applause] once the Phillips are placed I peeled up the masking tape and let the epoxy cure fixo only takes a few hours to cure so later that night I was able to get sanding and I personally am not afraid of using some power on these although I do know a lot of racketeers who prefer to hand sand everything I will say though for sanding fillets I recently discovered these little abrasive buff wheels and they are absolutely game changing so I will drop a link for them in the description below once everything was smooth I gave it a good cleanup and it's time to tip to tip this fin can okay this part is super nerve-wracking so what's going on here is that it is 12 45 in the morning Friday June 23rd lunch day is July 1st and I really need to get this tip to tip done before I go to bed so that it can cure well I am snoozling but this is a very high pressure tip to tip because this is the last of my carbon fiber all right the way I explained it to camera made zero sense so I'll try again here basically the way these fin shaped stack is four across this length that I'm cutting but each layup is only three sheets which is unfortunate because I wanted to cut them out wet to avoid frayed edges so with my strip ready I mixed up that epoxy mixed it up real good fun fact oxycure is better the more fun you have mixing it now you know and then I got to wetting out my carbon and once my carbon was fully wet out I laid down my template and then cut around it with electric scissors and electric Scissors by the way are like the most game changing tool in Composites I cannot recommend them enough I will link them down below I'm not trying to sell you stuff I just like they're they're so helpful anyway um I cut them out and then I get these nice clean edges that I can lay down on my fin can and I did that three more times and the problem here is that uh I the three times was great but then the fourth one had to be on a new set and it was already starting to kick and I ran out of time knock it oh it was humbling I need to rethink my strategy because that didn't work 30 in the morning Brian okay new plan I thought cut it dry wet lay up but because there will be masking tape it won't get all over the place that's the plan so with this new plan I was able to wet out each of the Carbon sheets individually and lay them up which means that I wasn't racing the epoxy cure time quite as much and that worked way better and so the next morning while the epoxy was still green and yes that means I only got like three or four hours of sleep that night I was able to use a box cutter to cut off all of the excess carbon and that cleaned up the fin can quite a bit so now I can do the rest of it with a sander to shape the leading and trailing edges I made this little wooden sanding block out of just an old piece of 2x4 but to be completely honest it was a pain in the butt it took forever and the Sandpaper kept falling out so I gave up and switched to an electric Santa with the fin can done it was time to move on to the bulkheads so I cut these out of carbon plate as well on the CNC and then I cleaned them up a bit before gluing them in I opted to do like a poor woman's Arrow pack here which is simply a bulkhead with a center hole for an eye bolt that connects for the motor to go through and with a hefty fillet I don't foresee the need for a full Arrow pack and it saves so much space inside the rocket for parachutes and other goodies okay so the bulkhead on here with no washers is a good tight fit um but I actually I want like um maybe a full term of extra space that I can actually tighten this in a little bit like I don't want it to bottom out so I'm gonna put two washers on here temporarily for when I glue this in and then when I actually fly it those washers will come out [Music] wow that's so satisfying oh my God it looks like a rock ET [Music] a lot of space this is so much better than a narrow pack with the motor back out I did some Bond prep with one of those abrasive buff wheel thingamabobs I talked about earlier and then I cleaned it up and put in a line like a ring of epoxy where the motor is going to slide back in it is so hard to see but there is a speed of epoxy [Music] with the motor in there as placeholder I was able to screw the eye bolt and the bulkhead in where they're going to sit in their permanent location and then just go in and add an extra fillet but since I couldn't even see what I was doing it was like really impossible to film I'm sorry moving on to the avionics Bay this is going to be the only part of the rocket that's not carbon because you can't really get GPS and Telemetry data through a carbon Faraday cage so the nose cone is actually fiberglass and the avionics sled and bulkhead I'm cutting here out of thin plywood the main structure of it is this piece of quarter 20 Rod that I cut down and what's really clever about this design if I may say so myself is that that quarter 20 Rod threads into the nose cone piece perfectly and so what I'm actually going to do is while the rocket is sitting on the pad to turn on and arm my avionics I can actually unscrew the nose cone piece take the whole nose cone off like have access to all of the flight computers at once and then I can just slide the nose cone back on and then screw it on and everything is perfect and ready to go and there's no switches sticking out to the outside of the rocket [Music] and while the nose cone is off the thing that's holding the structure together is the shear pins so I'm drilling sheer pin holes here now the downside of having the avionics in the nose cone though is that it's dual step dual deploy which means that there will be a separation of two body tubes of Rocket where there's a wire running through because it had to reach like the other section that separated to deploy the charges and so I had to make this really complicated bulkhead that has wires passing through it and those wires have connectors on the end and the idea is that when the charge deploys and it blows those two sections of tube together the wires will just slide out at the connector and then the whole thing can be reused and now it's a two pin connector and with the wiring pretty much done I headed over to my friend Joe's house from BPS space to have a little avionics party and also a little motor integration party okay and and action okay yeah and and action okay and and okay quiet on the set please can I get a clearance quiet on the set okay quiet on the set please what we're doing right now is I'm taking all of my flight computers that I have already programmed and just sticking them onto this very small piece of wood that's it so um yeah it just efficiently and then I'm gonna stick a backup GPS on here and uh that's it oh beautiful well that's some of the best YouTube content I've ever seen [Music] okay so we have our telemetrum here which is our primary fly computer it is going to log all of the data and it is also what I am hoping will deploy the charges but then as a backup we have the easy mini which is all it is is like a am I at this altitude should I deploy a charge yes go boom um so it only knows altitude it doesn't UPS the telemetrome is sending us GPS data so that's going to be how we find the rocket television kicks the bucket then we throw this little spot in there basically all I need my avionics Bay to do is tell me where it is and then it has to tell itself when to deploy the charges for the drogue and the main um drog will get deployed at apogee and then the main will get deployed at 200 meters it's motor integration day let's do this also um the key to a successful motor integration is doing it at your friend's house so if it blows up it blows up your friend's garage and not your garage hello this is a large box of explosives and what's really fun is that it's not one this was supposed to look like a really Suave too there we go three it's actually good for the motor when you slam it on yeah I know it absolutely six grains this is so exciting because the grains are so skinny it's so much propellant you have to focus tap the focus look at that pretty yeah so it's like all the and the skin work that makes it a skin work that's really cool um grain going in [Music] thank you all right so the lube is basically so that the liner can come out of the motor after we've launched it and it doesn't become like a permanent fixture into the motor case because the motor case 600.20 again you ready oh yeah wow it's like it takes effort this is harder than it's been before dude this is a lot of effort probably fine you ready [Music] yeah that works send it oh man I love when stuff like this works oh okay is your nozzle fine the nozzle's fine okay so it just slips off yeah [Music] okay you're almost there dude it's happening one two three it's working get in there [Music] all right xyla what's popping that was the hardest motor I've ever integrated Joe do you say the same thing yeah no I 100 um yeah so the motor liner like I don't know was too big maybe because the grain slid really easily into the motor liner but then the motor liner did not slide really easily into the case which means that de-integrating this bad boy is going to require I don't actually want to think about that for now the motor is integrated and it only required a ratchet strap some Kevlar line a hammer a dead blow some actually old pieces of yeatmist fins you know everything we're using the whole kitchen sink rad here so the next step is we just need to put on the nozzle like retaining ring thing um and the circle that has the O-rings I don't know what it's called and then on this side the forward closure and then we'll be good to go then you got a motor then we have a motor we'll go boom boom [Music] okay if it looks like my fourth outfit of the day it is and it's because I'm not good at planning and I also didn't want to cut carbon in a crop top so here we are anyway um I've been putting off mounting this camera for the entirety of this project because I built a minimum diameter carbon m2080 motor rocket and I'm like polishing it and except that I need to stick a camera at the side which means I have to cut a hole in my perfectly good racket and it's hurting my soul I just got the insta360 go 3 which is like this super tiny camera so at least the hole is not going to be that big you know what hot glue rhymes with Mach 2 for a reason and that's gonna be the Mantra from here on out I did this right until now it's time for the hot glue oh hated that did you hate that we both hated that [Music] oops surprisingly good I feel insane have I lost it I'm like gonna hot glue a 400 camera into a rocket at Mach 2. events to the 360 camera [Music] that's our camera harness okay time it I'm done hot glue mock too everybody okay so I need to drill sheer pin holes real quick before we eat ground toast so it is now L minus two which is a really good day to ground test because you have a little bit of time to fix things if they go wrong but the rocket should be pretty much flight ready by then so I basically needed to drill the sheer pin holes and pack all the parachutes and assemble it as if it was going to fly and what we're going to do is use the flight computers to deploy the charges and make sure that all the charges will go off and deploy the parachutes appropriately before screwing the shear pins in I did a continuity check on all of the Raceway wires that run through the inside of the rocket as well [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] was fully assembled I snuck it into my neighbor's backyard because she has grasped my backyard and mine is all concrete and it's just a lot easier to do this on grass so I set up a little test stand in her backyard and got to ground testing the telemetrum software has a ground test mode that lets you arm and fire black powder charges while the rocket is still horizontal Army and Fire [Music] okay all right Maine arms ready [Music] okay so it's time to the decal on and I couldn't decide which way to go I think it's this way but I asked Instagram so I did like a little Instagram poll and uh the internet agrees with me so 77 of people think that it should go this way it's not perfect no one's fully straight okay happy Pride [Music] so there's a Flyway rail guide and basically for like because this is a minimum diameter rocket uh and I want it to go all the way to Mach 2. I don't want these rail buttons to add drag to the rocket once it's like actually left the rail so what this does is it holds the rocket in place and then as soon as it departs the rail this these Springs will pop it open and it'll just fly off the rocket and then the rocket can go another 20 000 feet without drag you buttons and it makes good sounds [Music] I got a robotic scholarship I was like I'm never gonna run again [Music] foreign [Music] the perseverance parachutes were packed to the density of folk but that's the best I can do all right all right nighters we just need our black powder and we need our igniters and then we need to go wait I can go through the hole [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's really expensive to build these projects and sponsorships don't always cover the cost of materials if you want to support this Channel please consider joining my patreon or you can buy my sick merch that I designed I'm just saying for cold and that is a full year [Applause] [Music] this is fight thank you yo come here come here come here I want you to see some engineering genius ready that's all I fight see you in the Mojave [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] wow look at how clean that is her name is look it you know what's great about this is you probably did want like a little shim in there too yeah right yeah Silo this is amazing nice work dude thank you [Music] thank you okay so you're sure you're on Channel Zero sure I'm on Channel Zero [Music] I feel like this is like a worked tone foreign [Music] there it is ready [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh huge [Music] you're built different [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] we are T minus 30 minutes of the largest motor I have ever lived in my life I'm like surprisingly calm actually girls launching rackets what's the word Pals bye spy it's all fun and games when you're in the shop and then you get out of here and it's like there's 15 people 20 people asking me what's going on and it's suddenly like it doesn't matter how well prepared you are for rocket launch this is like three thousand dollars worth of stuff light on fire [Music] foreign we're good to go fly high Spike [Music] do it do it despite lunch in 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. [Music] all right [Music] seven thousand fifty four meters [Music] bestie yeah [Music] we got eyes [Music] but it's still attached so you know hot glue it Mark too oh she [Music] did [Music]

Channel: Xyla Foxlin

Views: 559,000

Keywords: Xyla Foxlin, rocketry, NAR, TRIPOLI, Skidmark, CTI M2080

Id: ZQvK8EFJQzw

Length: 34min 17sec (2057 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023