The Blue Flame - Speedquest

you hi I'm dick Keller and I put together this film over a period of time about my project the blue flame last speed record the opening scene shows the x1 prototype rocket dragster running at Rockford dragway in 1967 with Chuck supa driving it I worked at IIT Research Institute along with Ray dolls Minh I had the available to me the facility at IIT Research Institute machine shop and since I had a drag racing background I was kind of telling them all about you know my adventures with Don Garlits but he thought that was a tremendous waste of energy burning the tires and all that stuff and that we could do a lot do it a lot faster with a rocket by building a twenty five pound thrust prototype rocket and after that we had proven it we then started working on a twenty five hundred pound thrust rocket for the dragster so after seeing that we had scaled up the 25 pound thrust a hundred times for the x1 dragster we realized to go faster in the blue flame we needed to scale it up a thousand times so we would introduce liquefied natural gas as a fuel to burn with the hydrogen peroxide as the oxidizer rada'han and I then were assembling the catalyst pack into the rocket decomposition chamber this is Ray Dalton putting the silver the plated silver screens into the rocket combustion decomposition chamber this is me hiding behind the press they're putting the support plate on we had to press the catalyst pack to make sure that it wouldn't loosen up when we were running the rocket on the 2500 pound thrust x1 motor meanwhile Pete was up in Milwaukee beginning to build the x1 chassis Pete's gas welding the chromoly tubes for the frame and we built this in the garage behind his house Pete actually had built several dragsters and I got to know him several years before because we were hanging around Chuck Suba so we were building this chassis using chromoly tubing there's a kind of a conventional construction method at the time that later when we got into the into the blue flame it was going to be a monocoque construction similar to modern aircraft here he's looking at the front suspension we designed the x1 dragster to have four wheel suspension it was actually designed to look and behave more or less like a Formula One car when we decided to build a rocket dragster first question is what should it look like well my thought was it needs to handle well so that if it starts to move around we can control it Lupita's tying the x1 down with chains so we can do some static testing at the back of the chassis we have two horizontal cans for parachutes and one is up at a 45-degree angle we believe it's more important to know how to stop and to go fast and so the idea was to fire the two horizontal cans parachutes normally and then an emergency we had a much larger ribbon shoot coming out of that cannon 45 degrees you can see the rocket nozzle on the back there and then right behind the roll bar is the hydrogen peroxide tank and you can see the little spheres up front that have compressed nitrogen in them so here we're using the hand control to test fire the rocket this is the first time and we were firing it and I'm the test dummy and I'm really nervous lighting this thing up for the first time then the idea here is to show that we can control the rocket and stage it like a regular dragster we didn't want people to think you lit the fuse and ran like hell you know like with a firework this thing is totally controllable just like a piston engine I didn't go too fast on these two test runs because we had no parachutes on the car and they were the first time we ran the car so I was just relying on the brakes to stop it that was in May of 1966 in September we were on to Great Lakes drag weight again and by then Chuck Suba had decided he would drive the car for us and with the idea that he would also be the driver for the land speed beat and I had known Chuck for many years Pete and Chuck went to Evanston Township High School I went to st. George High School in Evanston and Chuck had a nice machine shop and chassis shop behind his house in Evanston his father's house and a bunch of us racers used to hang out there all the time so it was kind of a natural thing that when we decided that I was not capable of handling this thing in high speed that Chuck became the one the person he would ask to drive it Chuck he actually owned two jet dragsters at the time and his partner with his back to us in a striped shirt chase shellac was kind of dismayed because when Chuck started driving this he decided that as he said Jets suck he wanted to drive the rocket so these are the first runs that Chuck made in the car in September of 1966 and even without the body we got this thing to almost seven seconds flat 203 miles an hour which was faster than hit dragster at that time so this is for the first runs that we actually had on the car where we go fast because we have the parachutes and Chuck was learning a little bit about it we have four wheel suspension on it and after these runs we decided to make it solid at the back we didn't want it to get airborne for obvious reasons and here we are back at our favorite drag strip Union Grove so Chuck and get some runs in with the with the body on which was much easier for him because you didn't have the wind blowing on them at 200 miles an hour also it was more streamlined so intentionally could go faster reaction dynamics was a company that Rae Dallas Minh Pete Farnsworth and I started really focused on this project and getting the sponsorship to build the blue flame Chuck saw going to be wearing a regular fire suit just in case he gets some hydrogen peroxide sprayed on oh and we don't expect a fire but it is impermeable to the hydrogen peroxide there he's ready to go on the first run with the body on it you can see we put some scoops on the side of the car so that we would get more air going to the back of the car to fill the shoes packing the parachutes I always made sure that Chuck was doing that I wanted to make sure the parachute didn't open he was the guy that did it so we hit he had we had the two primary chutes laid out there here he's packing them into the small shoot cans as phil Rosina helped him put the body panels on here you can see unloading the the small 8-foot ribbon shoots into the cans this is at route 30 drag strip in Indiana Crown Point Indiana now we're getting ready to start that's raid almond and peach barnesworth and this run the car was timed it an ET of five point four one seconds which caused a lot of problems for us as we went on we think that was an incorrect et but what the result of that was we had trouble getting jet cars to race against us because we were so much quicker this was the last time he ran the x1 this was in 1968 September September of 1968 at the Oklahoma City dragway they had a big jet car race there and we were invited to come miss chocolate at the car as we get as we're preparing it this thing took a lot longer to do because we were doing it with our lunch money haha significant thing about this particular event besides it was the last time he ran the x1 was we had a big meeting and you can see the guys in the suits these are all gas industry executives and they were there to see firsthand what we could do with the x1 and they basically agreed at this event to sponsor the the blue flame officially here we're feeling the x1 with the hydrogen peroxide and pressurizing the nitrogen tanks so during this time period I was working at the Institute of gas technology and because of the enthusiasm of the management at these two the gas technology they were able to get behind the project and convinced the American Gas Association and about 40 of its members to ultimately sponsor the blue flame project it be careful with the hydrogen peroxide with it's a very strong oxidizer and it'll oxidize your skin this is art our files and the world a speed record several times in his jet car jet dragster so the neat thing about this particular event was our fossil was there as a former world record holder this is the Dwayne land and rocket car which was actually owned by Walter Fox who design and built it and it has a steam rocket in it so we were supposed to race against them and the idea we had was we had heard this thing was not too stable so we asked if they would make a single run to prove that it was stable before we would match race them so here they go on their single run and of course it crashed so that was the end of the match race we didn't have another rocket car to run against and the jet cars wouldn't race against us which also impressed the gas industry guys when the former world masky record holders decided they didn't want to run against the rocket because we were too fast military surplus jets running on jp4 I believe I think they were using afterburners at this time yeah we actually at this event we turned a top speed of 265 miles an hour much faster than any of these jet cars ever went and here's the last run of the x1 with Chuck scuba in it this is when he went to 65 we dropped one of the chutes that's why you have to here comes Chuck coming back the tragic thing about this whole scene for me is for four weeks Lee here we had the blue flame project finally being sponsored by the gas industry all we had to do is start working on that a month later Chuck driving a top fuel dragster was killed so here he was at the height of his career if you will and he was killed a month later and it was a big loss repeat nice as we known him since we were in high school we moved on to design the car and here we're at the Haas State University we're using their transonic wind tunnel and we needed to draft some additional engineering help because this project was lot bigger than us three can handle ourselves IIT provided through their mechanical aerospace engineering department dr. Horta and his graduate student Tom Morrell and they were in charge of the aerodynamic end of the design here we have the brass model in the wind tunnel you can see it has fairings over the back tires and a farad strut but we found out in the wind tunnel testing was this caused dynamic instability pitching and ultimately we redesigned the wheel supports and took off the fairings so that we could eliminate that particular issue result was the blue flame was probably the best handling whirl a speed record car ever we were able to run 24 runs with the car and we had still one of the original tires on it because there was so little tire wear from Yahweh here's Tom Morelle the red student from IIT working who was working with dr. pol tarda in the control room and you can see all the analog equipment there as a matter of fact in these days we did all a design with pencil and paper and with slide rules we had some use of an analog computer but we certainly didn't have the sophisticated software and digital computers we have today to do the design in the modeling of the car so now we have to move forward to build the blue flame and get that thing out to the salt flats here we're at the Great Lakes drag wave preparing to do static testing on the liquid natural gas fueled 22,000 pound thrust motor the upholstery in the car by the way was built made for us by Chuck subas dad Chuck's dad was a great fan of drag racing and he upholstered many of our race cars you can see the compressor we use for compressing the air for the blowdown fuel tanks and we were getting all of our or excuse me our hydrogen peroxide in aluminum drums 300-pound drums that took about eight of those to fuel the car with the oxidizer the hydrogen peroxide and the liquefied natural gas came in a separate container so the rocket itself is kind of a unique design it has three different phases of operation first phase it can be run as amount of propellant using hydrogen peroxide and that's what's in those solar drums their second phase we inject liquefied natural gas into a heat exchanger in the combustion chamber and then it comes out in the gaseous form to burn with the oxygen from the hydrogen peroxide decomposition third phase we inject liquefied natural gas as a liquid farther downstream and then burn that in the high temperature gases in the combustion chamber but here we're setting up the strain gauge to measure the thrust of the rocket motor we had some instrumentation that we borrowed from NASA both for monitoring the rocket testing and then later for monitoring the aerodynamic operation of the vehicle here's Doctor Who's Karras getting ready to record the readings on a strain gauge while we're running the rocket we have the product the the project of recruiting another driver for the blue flame fortunately we were able to find Gary gavel ik and his resume was quite convincing he had experience and large number of different vehicles including jet-powered cars and I'm the salt flats so as a result we felt he could adapt quickly to driving a totally different car such as the blue flame here's Gary gavel edge in the car and we're doing the static testing now Brennen is holding a pressure gauge everyone else was running like hell and sorry to stand in there wondering where everybody went you can see the car lunging against the cable and we had a foot throttle in the blue flame as opposed we had a hand thrive on the x1 so this is a little bit more sophisticated but easier to drive gary was sure happy to keep both hands on the steering wheel here's a night shot of the rocket motor being tested and you'll be see some sparks coming out and that was the old combustors of combusting and flying out the tailpipe so we redesigned the system for igniting the fuel we ended up using regular spark plugs fact they were champion spark plugs so on September 14 1970 we were driving down u.s. 40 out to the Salt Flats and we had our crew out there were unloading the car and the first thing we did was we changed the wheel bearings and started working on setting up our instrumentation we had doctors torta was garrisoned Tom Morelle with us to take a look at the instruments and monitor what we're doing as we were building up speed then we needed to pull the panels off there are the panels on this car are all stressed panels and so there's hundreds of screws as you can see pulling this thing together so we had to pull all these out in order to get at the the fuel compartment the peroxide compartment the front-wheel compartment also that nose piece comes off in one piece and underneath there we had a couple of titanium spheres for high pressure that plume in my hat was a Gary gap which was lucky plume we always had that island he was drag racing and since he couldn't wear it in the car he asked me to wear it to give him good luck so once the panels off then you can see they feel the peroxide tank there then towards the rear you see the compartment where the LNG tank is we had a small LNG tank in there because we could run the engine at three different power levels and we chose to go to the second power level where we didn't we were running the rocket sort of lean on the LNG we were sure we could get over 800 miles per hour and we were actually operating at about about 13,000 14,000 pounds thrust and we had a twenty-two thousand pound thrust capability so we really had dialed it back because we had never been to the Salt Flats before they didn't want us to just go out there and go Banzai here Ken McCarthy he was our first employee of reaction dynamics is working on getting the wheels put back on after we had replaced the bearings and here they're putting the brake caliper on so it was quite time-consuming you can see some of the parachutes in the parachute cans in the back there the parachutes were set up we had a two-stage chute system a 6 foot diameter chute came out at 600 miles an hour then at 300 it pulled out a much larger shoot shoot to get us down to about 100 miles an hour we can use breaks so Doctorow's gear says the red jacket on there dr. Porter heads back to us here's the LNG which is one of the main reasons we were out there yes we did put it in the car some people didn't think we used LNG whatsoever here we're doing a good job of cleaning up and waxing the car we wanted to keep it waxed to prevent to prevent salt buildup on the exterior which would also affect the aerodynamics here's Gary gapless checking things out he had the pitot tube in the front to measure the air speed and we had that calibrated by the Air Force while we were out there who's Jim deist working on the parachutes then Gary's trying out his fire suit when the Breedlove's and the archives is and so forth we're setting records they had to find a surplus jet engine to do the job and with us we felt all we had to do is decide how much power we needed we could build a rocket to do it so off we went so the cans on the back of the flatbed there those are the hydrogen peroxide cans just like we had a Union Grove drag strip and then that covered wagon there it holds the LNG so you can see it's quite an operation get this thing refueled and pressurized and ready to go between runs so it was important for Gary not to bring salt into the car so we're always making sure his boots were clean when he got in you can see one of the photographer's there from American Association and here we're closing up the canopy the canopy was screwed on from the outside but Gary had released from the inside Dean Dietrich is checking out the wind speed to make sure we're not over six mile an hour crosswind that was the limit for safety sake and natural gas industry is the blue flame designed and built by reaction dynamics that was PTIN myself here we go and one of the early runs and you would see the parachutes working here there goes the high speed chute and that little antenna on the side there that was our citizens band radio then you'll see it'll drop the high-speed chute and you'll see the low speed chute come out that was just the sky and assault and us that places is as desolate as it looks and there's Gary looking over the blue flame after setting the record at six hundred and thirty miles an hour and getting ready to put the horse away dry you

Channel: Dick Keller

Views: 51,484

Rating: 4.8959813 out of 5

Keywords: 630388, 622407, fastest car, Aussie Invader, liquefied natural gas, Bonneville Salt Flats, Auto & Technik Museum, hydrogen peroxide rocket, Gary Gabelich, fastest automobile, landracing.com, rocket dragster, Bloodhound, Speedquest, Chuck Suba, rocketman, natural gas rocket, LNG, Break the Record, world speed record, Wendover, rocket car, Sinsheim, Pete Farnsworth, X-1 rocket car, AOGHS.ORG, hydrogen peroxide, Dick Keller, land speed record, The Blue Flame

Id: 5PFEnzhP9Y4

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2013