Bottle launcher
A small rig to shoot empty bottles up into the air.
Recently, a friend of mine built a small rig to fire small film cannisters up into the air. You fill the cannister with some alcohol vapour, ignite it in a confined space and it shoots away with great force. I decided to make something similar, only scaling things up a bit.
That’s an empty 1 L bottle standing on my desk. “No added sugar or sweeteners”, it claims. Now I’m not saying that every drink without added sugar is bad by definition, but this stuff surely tastes disgusting. So the least I can do is to put the empty bottle to some good use. This is the idea: fill the bottle with some flammable vapours, seal it, ignite the vapour and – hopefully – BANG!
I fabricated a small launching platform from some junk that I had lying around.
To ignite the vapour inside the bottle, I use a flyback transformer powered by a simple NE555-based driver.
Today I tested the device using denatured alcohol (85% ethanol) as a fuel. Performance is somewhat worse than I expected but still pretty good: the bottle reaches a height comparable to that of a simple water rocket. I guess I have to play around a bit with different fuels (acetone?) in different concentrations to achieve better results.
(My little brother films and does the countdown.)
