[Captioned via Y Translator] Today, we're going to look at a fun and easy way to build yourself
a rocket using PVC pipe, water, and a soda bottle.
[Music]
To get started, we'll need a length of 1/2 inch PVC pipe,
four 1/2 inch PVC pipe caps,
three 1/2 inch T's,
and one piece of 1 and 1/4 inch pipe about 2 inches long.
We'll want a pipe cutter, a saw, or some way to cut the PVC.
This is what we've got in mind.
We'll build a frame and latch system out of our PVC pipe,
fill a soda bottle a little bit with water, and then add pressure.
Once it's where we want it, we pull a string, and let it fly.
First off, just a quick test, we want our soda bottle to just
barely fit over the PVC pipe, and with 1/2 inch PVC,
that's what it should do.
First up, we want to cut off a piece just over 1 foot long.
I'm going to go for about 13 inches.
This is the first piece of our launch set up,
and this is what's going to fit inside of our soda bottle,
which will be turned into our rocket.
We now need to build a frame, and it's going to be sort of H-shaped
with this piece coming right out of the center of the H.
Let's cut two pieces that are 10 inches long,
and four pieces that are 6 inches long.
[Music]
We want to attach a T on to the bottom of this first piece.
We'll have two pieces coming off of either side,
those will each end in a T-shape, and then we'll have arms coming
off of each of those spots.
With each of those four arms covered with a cap.
And with that, we have the basic frame
for our rocket launcher.
It's pretty stable.
It doesn't twist either direction.
Of course, right now, it's not held together with anything
but a little bit of friction, so it does collapse.
We'll be using glue once we're ready though.
Our soda bottle, which we're going to fill
with water, wants to fit down onto this launcher about two-thirds
of the way up the bottle.
Just mark that point.
That's about how far down we want the neck the bottom of our bottle.
As a launching mechanism, we're going to be using
a bunch of zip ties.
These things are durable, they're springy, and they're cheap,
which makes them a great tool.
We want eight of these.
Eight, there's eight.
These are going to be held in place with a pipe clamp.
We're just going to take that, and right now, we're
going to drop that down onto our pipe.
We want to be able to take all eight of these zip ties,
and space them just right evenly all the way around this pipe.
To do that, let's take a piece of duct tape,
wrap that all the way around the pipe,
and then mark where it starts and finishes, so we can line all
of our zip ties up against the tape.
We're going to leave about 3 and 1/2 inches of our zip tie
above the tape,
and you can see that on one side
of the zip tie, the head is just flat, and on the other side, it's a bump.
And we want the bump to be sticking up towards us,
and the flat side to be attached to the tape.
[Music]
There we go.
That's much better.
We've got almost a perfectly even distribution all the way around.
It's going to be off by a little bit here and there,
and that's not a problem.
We just want to try and make it as evenly spread as we can.
Let's just trim off the bottom of all eight zip ties right
below our tape.
[Music]
Now, we need our soda bottle down in place.
We've already measured that, and we want these zip ties
to be lined up so they are right above the widest lip on our bottle.
Not these little bumps that are the threads putting the cap on,
but this collar around the neck.
We want our zip ties to fit right above that.
[Music]
With the tape on there, it actually doesn't really stick too much,
because there's so many zip ties in the way,
that the tape isn't touching PVC.
But that's alright.
It lets us make sure we've got our alignment just right.
[Music]
The bottle where we want it.
Check the zip ties.
This is why we want our hose clamp.
This is going to squeeze down and really hold all
of those zip tie pieces in place.
There we go.
Now our zip ties aren't going anywhere.
You can already see the we can get a pretty
good grip on the bottle.
To get an idea of how this mechanism is going to work,
our 1 and 1/2 inch piece of PVC pipe,
we can fit right down over those zip ties,
when we drop our bottle down into place,
and lift this portion of PVC, it holds all
of the zip ties in place.
They can't move away anymore, and so now,
they're holding that bottle
right where we wanted, and even if you add a lot
of pressure pulling it up,
it's not going to go anywhere until we drop down this collar,
and set it loose.
One more thing we do want to do is that our bottle does fit pretty
nicely right over the PVC, but it's not a perfect fit.
And it doesn't need to be 100% perfect, but we do want a little bit tighter
than it is now.
We're going to use some electrical tape,
wrap it around this PVC post, and that will create a seal
that is water and air tight,
or at least, pretty close that will hold
while we add pressure to our bottle.
This marking where all of our zip ties reach to right now,
because this step, well, it may not always be
technically necessary, I think helps.
So I'm just going to loosen our hose clamp a little bit.
Now that we've seen how these are going to work,
I can drop them down out of the way.
This line here represents where our water bottle neck will reach,
and so we're going to start about halfway over that line.
I'm going to pull this electrical tape nice and tight.
So it's a very thin barrier.
I'm just going to wrap it around a few times.
[Music]
I'm taking the bottle, and I'm pressing it down,
and it's actually just smushing that electrical tape.
And that's just going to build up into sort of a ring.
That ring is what's going to hold all of the water and compressed air back
as we add pressure into our bottle.
Now, we need to take one of our caps and add a Schrader valve into it.
That's the same kind you see on a bicycle tire,
and that's how we're going to add pressure into the whole system.
We've got a 1/2 inch drill bit,
drill a hole right into one of our caps.
[Music]
Schrader valve stuck through, and now we need to pull it.
There we go, until it seats self.
There's a groove in the valve, and that's what we want
to sit right along the edge of where we drilled the hole.
At this point, we need to take some PVC glue,
and attach all of our pieces together permanently, making sure
that we have enough glue,
and they're really well attached, so that no air will leak out.
That glue does need to dry all the way before we start doing
any pressure testing on it,
but while it's drying, I think this is going
to be a good time to add some decoration.
Because we love declaration.
[Music]
Now, we do like decoration on all parts of the launcher.
However, the top part of this post really needs to be pretty smooth
so that our bottle will launch off into the way we want,
and we don't really want to get paint all
over all the moving parts, the zip tie pieces that
are gonna be holding stuff together.
So this top post will just be the color it is.
We've also taped off the Schrader valve, because we don't want to get
that plugged up.
The rest of it though, let's make it a little more interesting.
[Music]
Now that everything is decorated, we can move on to adding a little bit
of a spring system.
Now, this pipe is what's going to hold all of these zip ties closed,
but it you know, it's...
Gravity is currently pointing down.
We want it to stay up so that it holds our bottle locked in place
until we pull down on it.
So to make that spring, we're just going to use
a couple more zip ties.
We're going to attach them around this tube,
and around this T joint, and that should give us the spring that
we need to hold it in place.
I think it's time for a quick test with no water in our bottle,
and very low pressure.
This is just to see how everything is working out so far.
It is still really low pressure though.
It hasn't even hit like 10 psi.
[Music]
Tiny delay in taking off, but that hit my hand
with some good power.
So this is working out nicely.
We've got this all painted up, and we need to be able to pull this down
from a little bit of a distance,
so that we're not just like always getting soaked
every time we launch this.
Plus it's hard to watch it for right here firing.
So we need to attach some cord on here, and make it so we can pull from the side,
and have it drop this down.
So we're going to over engineer this just a little bit.
We're going to attach two of these eye hooks down into the PVC,
and they're going to be drilled, and then thread it in,
and we're going to add some epoxy just to make sure
that we keep our air tight seal through all the pipes.
Then we're going to have cord attached to the side of the PVC coming down
through the eye hooks, and connecting in the front.
So when we pull forward, it will pull down
on our trigger mechanism.
Our launcher is now built.
It should be complete and working well, so what we need now is to turn our bottle
into a rocket, and there's lots
of different ways we can do that.
Today, we're just going to use a little bit of craft foam
and duct tape to add a cone on the front,
and some fins on the sides.
[Music]
I'd say that works and it's time to start
filling this with water.
Take it somewhere like a field, instead of you know, inside.
See what it can do.
We've got our launcher, we've got our rocket,
and I'm just going to use some of these little garden stakes to make sure
that it holds the launcher down,
and I can already pull on this and trigger it pretty well.
But you know, if I pull too hard, I don't want it to tip,
and then shoot the rocket off, whatever weird angle.
We now want to fill our rocket partially with water,
and I say partially because it kind of ends up
being a little bit different every time.
Sometimes you want about 1/3 full, sometimes 1/2 full,
and we'll have to do some experimentation to figure out.
All right.
I'm just going to try and pop this on as quick
as I can to avoid spilling too much water down the tube.
[Music]
That worked all right.
Now, there may even be a little bit of leaking down at the seal,
and more once I start adding pressure,
but it's going to be minut.
It won't be severe, and it should still
work pretty well, even though it's gonna--
I don't think it's leaking at the moment, but it probably will
once I start adding pressure.
Just little bits trying to escape out that seal
between the water bottle and the tape around the PVC pipe.
All right, let's add some pressure, and see how this goes.
Oh!
Oh, I think it it popped off our lock a little bit.
When I say a little bit, I mean completely, because obviously,
it just popped right off.
It may be that we just need to add two more zip ties
on the sides to give some extra push up on this.
All right, we've got more zip ties adding pressure.
Let's see if that actually increases how much we can put in.
3, 2, 1.
More pressure.
[Music]
Random Fact: The fastest rocket record was set by the ATLAS V in 2006,
which reached a top speed of 47,000 miles per hour
or about 76,000 kilometers per hour.
There might be a little bit of water in the system.
3, 2, 1
Oh, almost had it.
So I think so far, we've had a lot of good launches.
Our best ones, probably went about a hundred feet up,
which is not bad for a soda bottle and some PVC powered by a bike pump.
We do have one more thing we want to try with this,
and that's just see what happens if we use a little bit
more luminescent fluid than water.
All right guys, now it's night time,
and we have two jars full of the two different components of glow fluid.
One of which is slightly going already because of a an inadvertent break
in the glass as I was emptying them out.
However, we'll add some fuel, and we'll see if we can get this
to launch with glowing fuel, the color of like rocket fire
flying out of the back of this.
I hope it works out.
We kind of only have one shot because...
Do you know how many glow sticks you have to get for this much liquid?
This is like 60 glow sticks right here, and they're big glow sticks too.
Maybe more, it might be as much as a hundred.
I wasn't counting to carefully.
But there's a lot.
And so yeah, we get about one shot of this.
I got super fancy high quality funnel that I made
out of duct tape.
[Music]
All right, I'm gonna add soap, swirl it around,
and then load it up.
[Music]
Ultra bright.
[Music]
All right.
Starting to leak.
3, 2, 1.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Oh that poor bike pump.
That poor everything.
Well, there's our-- Our spent rocket.
Little residual glow fluid coming out there.
I mean, Rocket Fuel coming out there.
That look great.
We got a couple of cool swirl patterns here.
I think maybe it's spun is it went out or something?
I'm not really sure, but we've got like a swirl arm that
that reaches around that way,
and then another one coming out this direction,
and you can just see the whole spray pattern everywhere.
The whole project is quick.
It's cheap.
It goes together easily.
This is a great thing to do with young kids, because it's just
water spraying out of a bottle.
Gonna be a lot of fun.
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