The accidental pocket jet engine...

Step 6: It lives!!!

So after pulling the little lever bit to start the gas flow I held a lit lighter to the end.

At first there was a nice flame out the end and after three seconds or so the was a small pop and the a strange wooshing noise, holy moses I made a jet engine out of a pen and lighter...

Comments

[coonass]

Hot DAMN! This is unreal! Ever tried putting this on a flat bed HO scale rail car, setting the whole thing on HO rail tracks and re-creating a rocket sled? Just curious. You should be able to put a micro scale of some sort in front of the assembly so the jet sled/rail car pushes against it and allows you to measure your thrust in ounces or grams. In fact, you could calibrate a system like this by cutting the explosive charge off of a model rocket engine, putting THAT on your rail car and measuring the thrust as I described - then comparing that to the rated thrust of the engine. That would give you a comparison. By measuring several different sizes of model rocket engine, you could work out a conversion factor to allow you to calculate the actual thrust from the readings on your scale just by calculating ratios of real thrust to measured thrust. If you're serious, of course, you'd need to burn up several examples of each thrust level model rocket engine to reduce the impact of observational error and/or chance mishap on your calculations. Good work, dude!

[bluemetaknight]

The jet here dosen't put out much thrust. Not even enough to move itself

[pastaking]

Or use model rockets specifically designed for cars - cutting off the explosive (recovery) charge prevents any thrust, if I remember rightly.

[geeklord]

carefull what you do with the explosive charge out of a model rocket engine(specificaly C6-3s and higher). Trust me, I would know that a 3rd degree burn all over the bottom of your hand hurts like hell, and takes really long to heal. Just a word of caution :)

[killerjackalope]

It's not quite at that stage but soon it will be...

[softairdude]

ok so you have this. now explain to me what makes the flames not light the piece of rubber on fire wich in turn lights the tubing on fire and then the entire gas tank. I know that rubber isnt flammable but arent there things that could cause that to happen?

[killerjackalope]

It's actually plastic from a Bic pen and it did eventually smoke with prolonged running, that's why I modified the original design to not include it...

[BEAST14]

this is awesome, if you were to make the hole where the thrust came out a little bit smaller would it increase the thrust??? If it will I'm going to put it on a micro RC car I have....