DIY Carbon Fiber Rocket

i've just built the biggest rocket i've ever made and launched it into the sky it's made from carbon fiber and is quite a beast i wanted to see how big i could currently build a rocket and i also wanted to get back some onboard video as recently i've had a few problems with getting cameras back this video was sponsored by onshape over a year ago i built a two-stage rocket which was a great success but unfortunately the craft returned to earth minus the camera which was a little disappointing how's it gone no the next rocket i built had a more securely installed camera but not everything went to plan this time either with a rocket flying far out of sight on the first launch essentially what's happened is it's gone my friends and i desperately searched high and low for any sign of it but in the end with a heavy heart defeat was declared and we decided we'd just go to the pub instead that brave little rocket was out there somewhere seemingly lost forever until one of my friends george this is george did some sums to calculate where the landing site must be and actually managed to track it down a few days later you are joking no way oh my goodness however due to a major cock-up on my part despite all of this i still didn't get any on-board video i might have forgotten to put the sd card in this camera i did say in the end of that video though if this video gets 15 000 likes then i will fly the x1 again and try and get some great onboard footage so i guess i had to keep my promise right in an attempt to rectify the major cock-up by actually remembering to put the memory card in the camera this time i took what i've learned from the first flight and rebuilt the rocket with some improvements such as a more aerodynamically optimized nose and a streamer rather than a parachute which would make sure that the vehicle didn't float too far away this time a streamer works much like a parachute in its drag slows the falling vehicle down now the main thing for all those wondering why don't you just stick a tracker in it james so i can better find the rocket next time i still didn't put a tracker in this rocket as gps trackers are generally too big while bluetooth trackers that i've tried before are basically useless due to their tiny range with the mods done i could now go out and fly this rocket again after checking about 10 times to make sure there was an sd card in it of course three two one wow there's the deployment that makes a change despite keeping my eyes on it all the way to streamer ejection at the highest point of the flight i somehow managed to lose sight of the bright orange rocket yet again on its return to earth as i briefly looked down at my camera damn i've lost it well once again the rocket has uh has been lost this time i was determined to find this rocket at any cost so i searched for three hours scanning field after field even almost losing my scout drone to a rogue snow shower that appeared out of nowhere because you know the uk weather is a bit weird isn't it eventually i saw an orange shape near a stone wall which was a huge relief now i could finally watch that footage so this is what that looked like so that was a big success i got some great onboard video and basically flew this rocket to the limit of how high you can go in the uk with a midpower motor that you can just get online however this whole experience got me thinking maybe it was time to stop aiming to build higher and faster rockets and go bigger instead let's see how big i could build a mid power rocket while carrying multiple cameras [Music] i started designing the new rocket on my computer with onshape most model rockets i've made before like the two-stage rocket are basically just made from paper you can buy special cardboard tubes for model rockets and they're pretty easy to work with getting into larger and more powerful rockets however requires stronger materials so i decided to base this rocket around this huge carbon fiber tube as it's super strong and very light this tube would need some custom parts to connect together though this was easy as i could take measurements from the components i was going to be using such as the motor and the inner diameter of the carbon tube and then cut up accurate virtual parts that could be printed out later on so i've been cracking on with the design on on shape over here and yeah using the assembly feature to mock everything up make it into the full rocket put all the components together see how they all fit i could design symmetrical parts like the nose cone from scratch using the revolve feature on on shape and then test print them using my 3d printers has this all looked good and i was happy with the fit of all of the test printed parts that i'd already made i laser cut the fuselage bulkheads and the fins for the rocket from six millimeter plywood laser cutters are really handy for quickly taking flat shapes from the computer and cutting them out from sheet material like this to attach the fins i simply epoxied them to the outside of the tube which might have been a mistake in hindsight i thought that smearing big epoxy fillets would make them strong enough but you'll see how well the fins lasted later i made sure to line them up with these custom laser-cut guides which helped to get them relatively straight unlike with the orange rocket this much larger and heavier rocket was going to fly quite slowly with the same power from a similar motor so it didn't matter as much if these fins were a few fractions of a millimeter off here or there next i started printing some hardware for the rocket such as the motor retainer which is just a thread and a threaded cap that stops the motor from ejecting itself i stole some launch buttons from the orange rocket and these are just things that fit into the aluminium extrusion rail that's attached to the launch pad so how was the rocket going to return safely to the earth well it was going to need some parachutes and a strong shock cord that ties the parachutes through the rocket this shock cord had to be really securely mounted to the carbon tube as it's pretty heavy and there'd be a lot of force going through this so i drilled holes for a u-clamp taking much care to vacuum up all of the dangerous carbon dust next up it was time to make some camera mounts i mounted this tiny insta 360 camera on an arm epoxied and screwed down low to get a good view of the flames from the motor to offset the drag and the mass of this camera i made a dummy camera which would go on the other side to cancel out the effects a big thanks to my patreons by the way for providing me with the funds to get myself new cameras like this one and yeah as a thanks their names are listed on the side of this rocket so that they can go along for the ride so how far off was i from launching this thing well first of all i needed to catch a break with the weather at the moment it's not looking good but hopefully by next week things will have cheered up a bit this is really why the uk doesn't have a space program while i waited for winter to end i did a bit more cad to improve my launch system so maybe this is a good time to tell you about the sponsor of today's video on shape as they've really helped to make this video possible in more ways than one onshape is a cloud native cad and pdm platform built for businesses companies like form labs trek and dark aero use onshape to design their products onshape is actually browser based which means it's accessible across all operating systems and works just like google docs an on-shape document is a single source of truth for your design data it's especially great for working with teams and hybrid work you can now collaborate with team members at the same time on the same document all across the world this means that data management is all built in so no more messing around with saving files onto local hard drives onshape also includes industry-leading manufacturing specific features for sheet metal and frame based design as well as surfacing configurations and detail drawings also with onshape you no longer need an expensive workstation all of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud things like rendering and creating large assemblies can be done on inexpensive devices one of the best ways to support my channel is to support my sponsors so make sure to go and check it out your business can try on shape for free at onshape.pro forward slash project air all right let's see if we can get this rocket off the launch pad as mentioned while losing the will to live with the weather i worked on improving my launch system to make it safer and more reliable to use specifically i decided i wasn't a fan of the remote ignition system i came up with last time despite the previous setup using multiple fail safes it wasn't foolproof a hard connection where i could power on the system at a good distance would make more sense here so i bought a 50 meter mains extension lead and cut off the plug so i could solder some connectors to it one end goes to the electronic igniter and the other end to my launch controller where you plug in the launch battery arm the circuit and flick this switch to fire super simple i made sure to test it out with a small igniter outside while i was wrapping all of this up the weather looked like it would briefly become much better for a launch attempt at the weekend so i hurriedly got everything together and then dragged along two of my friends to see if we could get this huge rocket into the sky how does it feel to be a assistant this is horrible i feel really nervous okay what about the rocket launcher no not being on camera this is the time delay and uh basically i'm setting how long uh i want there to be a delay before the parachute comes out i'm just drilling into this powder on the end and that means that the flames will go and burn through into the ejection charge a bit sooner however as i got my stuff ready to my huge annoyance i realized there was a huge problem with one of the pieces of launch equipment i'm connecting launch rail yeah i had two of my friends here who are all ready to go um we're all excited to see the rocket launch but unfortunately as we were setting up the launch rail i realized that this 3d printed part that i was using to connect the two one meter long launch rail sections together was not strong enough so my flatmate sam and i tried to quickly hack together an aluminium version of this 3d printed bracket but alas it wasn't strong enough and we had to just scrub the launch because using one length of this launch rail here is just not enough for a two meter long rocket learning my lesson over the next week i rebuilt the launch rail to be far stronger to take the three kilogram mass of the 2.4 meter tall rocket without wobbling about all over the place now it was ready for launch attempts number two okay finally the weather is looking a bit better this time hannah and sam decided not to bother getting up early for a launch that might not actually happen which was fair enough i suppose so instead mike offered to lend a hand i set up the cameras and prepped the launch pad the camera's on here so would my huge carbon rocket work would the fins fall off would the parachutes open with the cameras record time to find out mike's gonna launch the rocket it's his first time this is uh it's gonna be one hell of a launch this let's see what happens i'm gonna get in position five four three two one go whoa oh my god oh no [Music] that was absolutely awesome pretty pretty good launch wouldn't you say yeah yeah i think the parachute could have come out a little bit sooner but uh yeah easy to find a rocket this time yeah much easier to find than the uh the orange one oh we got a bit of damage though uh a little bit warm so the uh two of the fins fell off but uh that's all right we can learn from that so this was one thing i knew i needed to fix for the future i was getting the rocket back in several pieces can't really be considered a complete success thanks to one shape though i could access their mobile version of the software and make some notes about how to improve the design perhaps next time i could design a 3d printed fin can that the fins could be bolted to which would help their survivability upon landing i like that parachute yeah that parachute's pretty good isn't it i think you slowed it down enough it did slow it down because yeah what's this nose diving to begin with yeah yeah but it took a while for them to inflate didn't it yeah they literally was like it's a base strip it wasn't right right before the end i was worried that the camera was missing but the fake camera is missing the real one it's still recording is it still recording it's blue successful recovery of the cameras finally time to take a detailed review of what happened all right let's see what the onboard footage was like we can see from this angle that the vehicle stayed very stable on its ascent up to what looks like the predicted altitude of 75 meters only rolling about 360 degrees before the parachute ejection it took a few nerve-wracking seconds for the shoots to inflate and finally slow the rocket just before touchdown in total the flight lasted just 12.5 seconds but yeah we got some great video which was the aim and now i've succeeded in setting a new personal record for the largest rocket i've built and flown so far if you enjoyed this video then maybe you can check out another video on my channel maybe like this one over here and thank you very much again to onshape for making this rocket build possible more projects like this to come i think i'll see you on the next one

Channel: ProjectAir

Views: 1,208,657

Keywords: James Whomsley, whomsley, James, projectair, 3d printing, rc, r/c, airplane

Id: hQ8Y0npq0_o

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022