Water RocketsReturn to Jim Gallant's Homepage

Barbi e TBird Rocke Big Foot vs. Barbie T-Bird t Car Rocket Car

Rocket Plane with Tube Motor

Rocket Plane with 2 Liter Motor

Welcome to my evil lair, I mean my evil water rocket page. It all began last spring (1999)when my friend Frank Kaplan said, "Hey, you oughta search for water rockets on the web". Being a web savvy kind of guy I did, and discovered the wacky world of water rockets. With 2 part epoxy and anything involving high pressure being some of my favorite things I was deeply intrigued. Scouring every site I could lay my HotBot on I kept gravitating back to Gary Ensmenger's awesome www.h2orocket.com site. I was particularly taken by his Anti Gravity Vortex Rockets. I liked the crash-worthy, rubber band attached, cold formed, lexan fins. And I liked the inherent stability of a "stemmed" rocket. The detachable stem and fin design got me thinking about a modular design where fins, stems, varying number of bottles, and even a parachute device could be easily configured with no tools. To this end I embraced double ended bottles, and created the coupler shown below. Double ended bottles

You make double ended bottles by cutting off the bottoms of 2 liter bottles with a razor knife, curling the edges by pressing the cut end on a heated-on-a-stove-top circular saw blade, then very briefly dipping about 1" of the the curled end of the bottle in boiling water to shrink it, and finally using PL Pemium adhesive to glue two curled bottles together using a sleeve of another bottle. Then use filament packing tape to reinforce the walls of the rocket. My rockets repeatedly withstand 140 psi of air pressure!

Coupling device for double ended bottles

This coupler involves drilling holes in two bottle caps and epoxying them into a short length of 1" pvc thinwall pipe. They're cheap and easy to make, and you can easily chain together many double-ended bottles, with no tools. Of course this depends on double ended bottles.

The Launcher

==> Click here for details on the launcher