Rockets
Solid fuel and very small amounts of liquid fuel (at bottom of page)
The full system in work

For a very long time my friend, brother and I have worked on solid fuel rockets. We have mostly focused on a sucrose kno3 solid fuel in a verity of ratios and with supplemental ingredients such as red iron oxide. We never had great or predictable success, most ended in CATO or rapid unscheduled disassembly seen in the photo above. This mostly stemmed from a lack of an accurate scale to get consistent and correct mixtures. This obviously made finding and correcting issues a challenge. On top of the mixture issues we would often find the rocket failed at the casing which was usually made from paper and tape due to our tight budget of what we could find around the house. Despite the issues this project gave me great insight on failure in engineering and how to deal with them, I also learned a lot about implementing an iterative design process. While I would say we never were fully successful the knowledge about solid rockets, nozzle design, chemistry, and the aforementioned skills were far more valuable than getting one to fly further than a few tens of feet.
Below are picture of rockets, rocket building, launches and failures.






3d printing made making nozzles much easier
