Materials and Procedure

Procedure

To begin, we did not immediately go to building. What we first did was go to the drawing board. We drew all the key components of the rocket such as the parachute, wings, and nose cone and talked about how we would protect the egg and make the bottle separate. After agreeing on an initial design, we then started building. We used 2 Pepsi bottles which fit on the launcher nicely. We also put a lot of focus on the safety of the egg. We used packaging foam as a first layer to wrap around the egg, then we wrapped the egg around egg carton foam. We also put cotton balls to fill the gap between the tip of the bottle and the safety mechanism. With all the safety mechanisms packaged in, we put the parachute over that so it would be able to deploy. We used the hole puncher to put holes in the bottle and in the garbage bag we used as our parachute. We used string the attach the parachute. We made the string very short so that it would deploy quickly and be less likely to get tangled. Instead of tying the string, we used a hot glue gun to attach the ends of the string together. We built a nose cone out of newspaper originally and the construction paper, but for our final launch we did not use one (see results section for reason). When we were using the nose cone, we attached it to the bottle with tape. For the wings, we first used 3D printed wings, but they were very large and heavy, so we switched to laser cut foam wings. We attached the wings to the bottle with the hot glue gun. For the two halves of the bottle, the only thing keeping the two halves of the bottle together was friction, and we would place the top half of the bottle very loosely on the bottom half so it would come off easier, and we put the parachute hanging out a little bit so it would deploy. For our final launch, we used a water amount of about ⅓ to ⅜ of the bottle. We all had to use a psi of around 40.

Materials

5 hard boiled eggs

2 2-liter bottles

Newspaper

Garbage bag

“Egg carton” foam

Packaging foam

Cotton balls

PLA ( 3D printed material for initial wings)

Laser cut foam for wings

String

Water

Bottle rocket launcher

Bike pump

Construction paper

Hot glue gun

Scissors

Hole puncher

Exacto knife

Altimeter

Small snack container

Cling/Plastic wrap

Sandwich bag

Tape