Quick cool projects: Matchhead rockets

This post will be about a very quick and easy "project" you can use as a past time: making matchead rockets.

It takes only minutes and basic household items you already have to get started, and you can spend as much time as you wish perfecting the process or actually firing said rockets.
It's also a lot of fun, lighting them, watching them take off, and chasing and putting out the various fires they will start when landing everywhere (just kidding, but be careful though, the risk is real).

Those tiny projectiles are made of full matches, or just match heads, rolled in aluminium foil, and fired from a thin wire base, by applying heat with a lighter.
Once you get good at making them, or find your own secret recipe, you can shoot those pretty far !

Perfect for rainy slow days, or to compete against your friends.

Materials

Only the most basic materials are necessary to get started:

• Matches (Ideally paper matches, but variants exist for wooden ones too)
• A small pin
• Aluminium foil
• Paperclips or anything else to act as a launchpad.

If you go the wooden match route, you might also want to have a sharp cutting implement such as a hobby knife or razor blade.

Basic design

In their most classic and basic form,  match rockets are made as shown below:

• Lay the pin alongside the paper match 
• Roll both in a doubled up piece of aluminium foil.Be sure to make a tight seal on the end to prevent blowoff.
• Gently withdraw the pin, being careful not to crush the tiny exhaust port you just formed.
• That's it! Lay your rocket at an angle, and hold a flame under the tip.Within seconds, the rocket should take of...or blow up. Expect this for your earliest tries and don't get discouraged.You'll quickly find your own perfect balance between a tight seal and a working nozzle.

Variations

Now comes the fun part: experimenting.
Once you understand the basic principle, there are countless variations you can try to optimize your flight distances:

• Alter rocket weight or weight distribution
• Alter tinfoil shape,folding and size for optimal weight/resistance ratio
• Use multiple pins to make multiple exhaust ports
• Reduce friction of your launchpad (use polished metals instead of wooden skewers)
• Use multiple matchheads at once, remove match body altogether in favor of full tinfoil body with one big central exhaust...
• Add tiny stabilisers...
• Go over the top, engineering cool or unusual launching platforms 

Here are some examples of variations:

Shorter matches, dual exhausts

Alternative foil shape, dual exhausts.

The king of random over at Youtube, has a very intricate but pretty efficient design !

Pure aluminium over a paper clip, no wood.I found this design to work very well with dual matchheads, and a reinforced tip.

An over engineered adjustable launchpad

A pure aluminium multiple head rocket with fins, fired from a straightened paperclip from this video

But this is becoming too long of an article for such a simple past time.

Just go to the kitchen, grab the supplies, and make some of those already.

Once again, a quick search on Youtube will come up of plenty inspiring designs to try if you think this is a past time for you.

See you soon for discovering more cool hobbies, projects, gadgets and uncommon knowledge!