I Think It's Going To Be A Long, Long Time

About two weeks ago we had a spontaneous grill-out with my sister-in-law and her three girls.  I was feeling rather productive and a moment of inspiration struck while taking out the recycling.  About 20 minutes later we were launching soda bottle rockets.

My first few attempts worked but not really how I expected.  I took a bike inner tube,  just happened to have a flat one laying around, cut off the stem and wrapped it with a strip of the inner tube to make a cork which I shoved into a 2 liter about half full of water.  The idea, as I understood it, was that you pump air into the bottle until the water starts spraying out the stem.  What happened was I pumped air in until the cork shot out and the bottle flew off randomly.  It was cool, and the kids loved it, but finding the cork was difficult a few times.

Back into the shop I went to get some PVC, I've got a lot laying around, and a larger piece of inner tube.  I took the cork I made earlier and rewrapped it to fit into the PVC.  I also wrapped a piece of inner tube around the pipe to form a seal with the mouth of the bottle.  This worked much better.  The bottle flew straighter and I could aim it a little bit.  The only problem is that the resulting spray completely soaked me.

The next time we work on this I'm going to add a release to control when the bottle launches and a couple bends in the pipe so I don't get soaked.  Maybe fins and a nose cone on the bottle.  And explosives.  Fire makes everything awesomer.