Making New Friends

Long time no post on this blog. Life has a habit of taking over, with family matters to deal with and plenty to do, One distraction has been my dear old Dad, who crashed his mobility scooter (going too fast) and broke his femur. Bloody Campbells!! I've simply not spent the time to keep things up to date here.

What have we been up to? Quite a lot!

Money has continued to be tight, so we've stuck to the plan to focus on things that were of the highest import for moving things on.

Rather than spend money on running the car, we've been concentrating on improving the chassis and getting a proper handle on the performance and manipulation of the rocket motors. There has been quite some interest in the rocket motor technology for applications other than going fast on four wheels.

Trouble with these space-rocket folk – they want hard numbers – performance data. We simply have never had the facility to do proper measurement of thrust, flow-rates, chamber pressure and stuff that the scientists need to know. After putting our toe into the strange world of space technology, meeting a few very talented and interesting people and attending a couple of events, we've made some very useful new friends.

James Macfarlane, M.D. of 'Airborne Engineering', and his team at Westcott, have turned out to be a really worthwhile discovery. James has a fantastic facility with fully instrumented testing bays, a well equipped workshop on site and a huge background knowledge and data-base relating to all kinds of rocket motors. He also happens to be a lovely guy, who is patient teacher, with a passion and enthusiasm that is quite infectious. James has a very rigorous and objective approach, which is a good balance to our energy and enthusiasm.

In between conducting testing for companies such as 'Reaction Engines', James has donated time and facilities for testing our systems and collecting the data we need. We have already had one initial day of testing, where we were able to match our systems and testing rig to his rig and instrumentation and to fire a rocket successfully. The rocket we fired was a pretty mild set-up with a small injector, it ran well and gave us some excellent base-line data for further testing. Last week we returned and conducted two further tests. Each rocket was identical to the first test, but each had a progressively larger N2O injector. These were relatively short firings, we'll investigate potential duration at a later date. These firings went very well, with performance conforming to James' predictions and will the usual flat curves for thrust and chamber pressure. Thrust levels and were very good. We think we've arrived at the set-up required for the car.

There was no damage to any part of the rockets.

We are not going to release this data to the general public, I'm afraid, as we have reached a point where we do have to start looking after our intellectual property. Suffice to say, it does appear that we can indeed get these motors to do exactly what is need for the car to fulfil it's potential.

We have also been struggling with castors! The car has a turning radius of an oil-tanker, and is twenty five feet long. So we developed dollies to under her to allow manoeuvring in tight spots (such as getting her out of the workshop!) We've never made them run smoothly and steer easily. It turns out that castors are very subtle bits of simple engineering.

We needed expertise. It arrived in the form of Tim Murrow at 'Bil Material Handling'. I made an enquiry about wheels for our dollies, after doing a bit of 'googling'. We were just looking to buy some of their obviously excellent and strong wheels. When I told Tim what we wanted them for, 'Bil' immediately offered to supply the wheels at no charge. The wheels are great - they glide along like silk. Unfortunately our home-built castors, in which we installed them,, still are very hard to steer. Tim came back with an offer to have their experts review the situation and sort it out for us – again at no charge. Brilliant! What a great company!

We sent them a couple of pics for their company newsletter, they sent us some 'Bil' graphics to go on the car, and now they've offered some very welcome financial support. You just never know when or where your going to run into the right kind of people.

The car will now be on display at their headquarters in Calne in Wiltshire in the 13th of September.

Better Late Than Never!

It's been some time since I last added to the 'Laffin-Gas' blog. David and I took a couple of months off to visit family and friends that are sprinkled around the planet. We visited son, Ken, and his new family in Maui (Hawaii), then our great buddies, Mark and Pav Stacey in New Zealand, followed by David's amazing sister, Judy and my other son. Will, in Sydney and Brisbane.

Last year, we made great strides in the performance and power of the rocket systems with the development of the bi-fuel motor using kerosene as the fuel. Tests indicated that we would be able to achieve around 6,000lbs of thrust from the four rocket motors in the car. With a weight of just under 1,000lbs (minus the all-too skinny driver!) that indicated a power-to weight ratio of 6:1.

A car that can pull 5-6 g under constant acceleration made us re-think where we should be going and what we could possibly achieve. It became clear that, with the right modifications, it would be possible to hit 400mph and get safely stopped on a two-mile runway right here in the UK.

This is a very ambitious and risky venture, of course, but it's a terminal speed that could only be hit using rocket-power. You need to get up to speed in a very short distance (about 1./3rd of a mile) in order to have enough room to get safely stopped. The rocket systems in the car are up to that job.

The car, at present, needs quite a few changes, including new, higher speed, wheels and tyres, more braking power and some new, much slicker, bodywork. We've made a start by enclosing the cockpit and, bit by bit, we're accumulating the new parts to up-rate the chassis from a drag-car to something a bit more capable.

On Thursday 10th June we conducted a final in-car static test of a single kerosene/N2O rocket to confirm that the systems were all working as they should and to be sure that the power we've observed, in test-rig firings, was being re-produced in the car with (all it's extra systems). The test went very well with the car leaping forward against it's tether and the rocket producing a level of power that is quite astonishing for an N2O rocket. You can watch the firing at: youtube.com/laffingastv or click on the icon on our homepage dashboard.

We had decided, last year, that we would only return to running the car when we were satisfied that we would be able to achieve a decent level of reliability. That time has now arrived, so testing can now move from the farm to the runway.

This project has never had outside financial support, so David and I have always had to proceed at a pace that our meagre finances could support.. With the recent recession, and now the massive increases in prices for fuel, power, materials, we've had to go even slower than before. We've tried to concentrate on things that require time, effort and use of all the tooling we already have, rather than on things that require big lumps of cash. We're a bit like the old sit-com; 'The Good Life', only with spanners instead of spades. We're self-sufficient and resourceful, so we can get things done for a fraction of the cost one might expect.

We've done a lot of work on the transporter, which, (with it's generator, compressor, refrigeration units and other kit) is as much a part of going fast as the car itself. One of the biggest jobs was to paint the whole thing white to help the refrigeration units in their struggle to cool gasses and the car on warm summer days. It's made a massive difference and the cooling systems are doing a much better job.

We've also constructed a WW2-style canopy for the cockpit. Having added more ballistic protection behind the driver's head, in the form of a titanium dome, we simply had to enclose the cockpit as we’d turned the entire roll-cage into an air-brake!

On the rocketry side, we've been doing a lot of design work on scaling up to produce a 20,000lbs thrust system for possible use in the ever-growing private space-flight industry. Nitrous oxide hybrid rockets have long held out a promise of cheap and relatively safe rockets for flight, but have never achieved the performance and safety levels needed for the job. Our systems represent a real breakthrough in both performance and safety, renewing the possibility that Nitrous Oxide rockets will be a viable way of getting payloads into space. The car is a wonderful way for little guys like us to demonstrate to the world just what us Brits can do from our back-yards.

There is a way of thinking, these days, that great projects and engineering breakthroughs only come from big companies with big budgets and massive teams of people. When we look at our engineering history we find that much of the really good stuff came out of little workshops and very small, passionate and ingenious groups of people. Ken Tyrrell took three F1 World championships (against the might of firms like Ferrari), working out of a woodshed. Frank Whittle did much the same with his Gas Turbine 'Jet' engines. Colin Chapman started Lotus in a garage behind a pub. So there's no reason why a record smashing rocket-car, and revolutionary rocket technology can't emerge from the machine-shop at the bottom of our garden.

We've now reached a stage where some external financial input is needed. Not a lot, but some. Force India's budget for ONE DAY, would be enough to get us to 400mph! This could be a great opportunity for a company that wants to raise its profile by getting involved with a bit of old-fashioned romance, passion, adventure and engineering achievement. So any one, who would like to come along, 'kick the tyres' and see for themselves if this is for real,get in touch and come and have a butchers!

If you've got an event coming up and would like something to add a bit of spice and interest, why not book us to bring the car along and give an entertaining, sometimes amusing, not-to-difficult talk on our adventures in rocket-science?