It's only rocket science...: February 2016

It has been a while since I have been able to get back into building rockets. After my career move down here to Cape Cavaneral, I have been rebuilding my infrastructure. Currently, my spare bed room in my apartment is has been converted to a rocket research lab and I have been aggregating all the tools that I need to continue development.

To date I have been able to equip myself with:

Grizzly 7x14 Lathe that I am upgrading with an arduino based power feed that will read the RPMs and move the tool at prescribed rates to give the best finishes and certain threads per inch.

90A flux core MIG Welder that I converted to DCEN with a 100 amp bridge recitifier, 94,000mF capacitor bank (40 individual capacitors), and a 40 turn torodial core inductor. The stock AC welder would barely even weld 1/8 in steel and even then it was very sporadic and popped slag//bb's all over the place. Since the conversion, the welder just sounds mean! A constant sizzling bacon sound with up to 1/4 in 4 thousands gap penetration with the settings only turned up ~3/4 of the maximum. I got the welder on sale for $80 then put $30 worth of electronic into the upgrade and its performance now is EASILY comparable to some of the $500-600 machines I have welded with in the past.

2 x 1000 psi regulators. One of which is oxidizer hardened.

I have also designed and started to build my thrust stand that will be able to host a variety of sensors, high speed loggers, and data acquisition instruments. I have been learning machine code and the fundamentals of optimization to develop my data loggers. So far I can get a sample rates nearing 5-7 microseconds which should be plenty of resolution for future testing.

My latests efforts have been focused solely on the building of my 3 axis CNC router. It will serve as the backbone for roughing out blanks and cutting out my injector plate stacks. Eventually I will upgrade it to a 4th dimension on the router head and install a 4th axis spindle.

It will be primarily steel construction. Bed size is 32 x 21 inches made of 2in square tubing with 1/8 thick walls and the red gussets are 1/4 in steel plate. Currently, I have the base frame and gussets made. I also have all of the linear rails, bearings, 1-1/2 hp router, stepper motors, stepper motor drivers, all 1/2"-10 acme lead screws. Its just a matter of time before I can finally get this put together.

Welding Machine and welding table