Birth of the Blue Missile

Here's part seven, This speaks to my inventive side, and as you will get to experience on the new build.

Also I am going over to the general discussion to post pictures of my guitars then/now in a thread called guitars anyone, I think
Andrew

I was not going to talk about this item but at Larry’s insistence I will.

But first a little more background is in order.
When I was ten or eleven, my father spent a lot of time at a textile plant in Stafford Springs Conn. Owned by Burlington industries. He was one of their head textile designers and his specialty was paisleys. Chances are if you were wearing them in the sixties they were his. I hung out at the chemistry lab. One of the chemists had a very large book on how to make fireworks of all kinds. From this book I even learned how to hand roll and fabricate rocket engines and make ‘sky rockets’.
One day while helping them process some samples, I had some bleaching agent desolved in some boiling water. While transferring it to another container I spilled about a cup of it on the floor. In the lab there were no towels or even kitty litter, this was the early sixties, they used blotter paper to soak up messes. So I threw a couple of pieces of blotter paper down on the spill and sort of forgot about it. Later I went back to it and it looked good as new, so I threw it back on the stack. There were a couple of guys from DuPont in the plant trying to sell the idea of using a new cellose/paper fabric they had developed to make tweed suits. The lab did wear tests and wash /bleed tests and the sort. After one of the wash/bleed tests they were drying a sample in sort of a big fabric press with a heated plate top and bottom like the old fashioned presses you see at the drycleaners. When you dried the fabric you would take and put it between two pieces of blotter paper throw it on and close the press to dry the sample. Well I guess their number was up. They grabbed my two pieces of blotter paper and put the wet sample between them and threw the whole affair on to the press and closed it. It seems that as long as there was water to evaporate off everything was cool. But as soon as it all dried out the blotter paper exploded with a flash coming out from between the top and the bottom of the press and blew a horizontal piece of the guys suit away. When he opened the press there was nothing left to see. Of course every one looked at me, I explained to Mary, the assistant director of the lab, and to the guys from DuPont exactly what had happened. They looked at her, and then at me and said “well OK it looks like you just invented a new type of explosive!” and were on their way.
After that I got involved with model rocketry (why build motors when you can buy them) and never really lost my love of watching things go zipping by. Bringing us back to the main story.

Now back to Larry’s item:
After that trip I got a hankering for something James Bondish on the car. So I installed an under the hood rocket launcher. He recently described it this way in one of his latest E-mails:… (don’t forget about your ¾” copper pipe, alligator clip, guitar string, Estes rocket sidewinder missile contraption L.W.)

It was really a one inch copper tube a couple of feet long with a ninety-degree elbow just slid on the end so it was removable. The exhaust part of the elbow was pointing towards the inner fender wall and the ignition wires were run through the back of the elbow going to the igniter in the motor. The back of the tube was clamped down to the top of the inner fender. The front of the tube was sitting in the 1” round hole on the passengers side of the radiator support that clears the hood when you pulled the inside hood release. The hood would pop open and the secondary hood latch would engage the spring would hold it up and the flight path would be clear of the hood. You could then arm and launch the rocket electrically from the console ashtray. I really never used it for an ashtray anyway.The rockets did use Estes engines, the nosecone and body were about six inches long, with three sticks (like a bottle rocket) for fins. Unlike my final Physics project at the academy, which was a 1.75” shoulder mounted collapsible rocket launcher with an exploding warhead; the one for the car did not have a warhead.


OK…….So as not to, leave you hanging for too long.
For my final Physics grade I thought this might be fun.
The one at the academy was made out of two sections of chromed metal vacuum cleaner tubes (you know the type for the old Electrolux vacuums that would slide into each other to extend the hose and that had little slits on the large receiving end of each tube). It had a hand carved wooden affair, hose clamped to the front of the back tube, that served as the front handle and that contained a momentarily switched trigger. There were two large square six-volt batteries (3”x3”x6”long) hooked in series, clamped to either side of and at the very rear end of the back tube, that would sit on your shoulder. It also had a ten-X scope attached to the front tube, that I borrowed from another cadet Earnest, who was my partner in crime. We bore sighted the scope on a telephone tower about three miles away so it was accurate enough to hit something say a hundred yards away. The rocket was powered by the largest Estes motor available at the time, and had hinged fins that centered it in the tube and then folded out and back after it left the tube. I will not describe the warhead but suffice to say it blew a branch off the tree it hit fifty yards away. This occurred when I fired it for my final Physics grade, with half of the academy in attendance. OK, really, I got an ‘A’ in Physics and the project was built with the complete approval of my Physics professor, you know this was a military academy after all. But after the demonstration, the weapon was immeadtly confiscated by the ranking military official Major William Buckley. My room was then torn apart by the staff and all construction materials were confiscated. I was then later asked to report to the Major’s office. When I got there the Major told me what a good job I had done and I noticed it hanging on the wall over his desk. He was nice enough to give us back the scope. And as far as I know for as long as he was in command there it remained over his desk. Who says science isn’t fun!!!

more later