This book has quite a history.
The Rocket Manual For Amateurs by Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley.
Originally published in 1960, this was the second edition from 1968.
As the pictures show, the book contains full instructions on how to make steel pipe rockets filled with zinc and sulphur propellants. Other propellants are discussed.
This is not a guide for "basement bombers", but I'm sure it inspired a few accidents as most kids wouldn't follow the guidelines in the book.
"Safety" is fully covered including how to make a bunker, illustrations show hard hat wearing figures tamping down the propellant.
You can make a wind tunnel using two vacuum cleaners and a bicycle tire rim is turned into a make-shift centrifuge. Other instructions show how to make a spring scale accelerometer.
I bought this book in 1970 from the Johnson Smith Company, the same place that sold the "Ventrillo" and X-Ray Specs inside the front cover of comic books.
Johnson Smith was also the first place I bought rocket engines through the mail. It doesn't sound like much today, but in 1970 you couldn't get model rocket engines sent into California.
They made a mistake, I got MRI A3-2s!
You can see in the first picture, in the upper left hand corner, the price was cut off. This wasn't done by me. The folks at Johnson Smith decided to raise the catalog price and probably had older copies with the lower cover price.
This book is for sale if anyone is interested. (Sorry, sold on Ebay 2013)
Ah ... The Grail. No rocketeer's library is complete without copies of RMA and Stine's "Handbook of Model Rocketry." The big question is ... did anyone actually BUILD any of the stuff described in here?
ReplyDeletemy friends and I built and static tested before flying a number of Zinc dust # sulphur pipe rockets using expended CO2 cartridges Before upgrading to nozzles sculpted Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty. That was in 1962 shortly after purchase of the book when it appeared on Soda Shop magazine racks. Rockets were about a meter long with aluminum fins and DRHWP basked slug bulkheads. They worked brilliant easily reaching altitudes of well over 1,000 ft as tracked by home made theodolites.
DeleteIn 1970 I participated in a model contest. One of the models entered was a rocket built from this book. Talking to the builder, he stated it took over a year to machine the nozzle. The judges did not understand that it was a real rocked. They dismissed it as just a "tube."
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