Bertrand Brinley described a method of making solid fuel rocket engines from sugar and an oxidizer. While there is a fair amount of information about how to make them on the web, we decided to try some experiments of our own to see what we could come up with.

Since we're literally playing with rocket fuel here, we decided on the following safety rules:

• Work in very small batches (<20g as a starting limit)
• No tightly closed containers (relaxed in later tests to allow mixing in closed containers with known failure behaviors)
• No open flames or sparks until we're testing
• Test in the open, on stone with a metal tray under the test area

Fuel Tests

• RCE Test 0: Powdered sugar
• RCE Test 1: Cornstarch
• RCE Test 2: add Methanol binder
• RCE side test 1: Particle size
• RCE test 3: reduced particle size
• RCE side test 2: Solubility
• RCE Test 4: Mixing in Solution
• RCE Tests 5-7 (a/b): Hybrid fuels
• RCE Test 8: Great balls of fire. Not.
• RCE Test 9: Glycerine bound in tube
• RCE Test 10: Sodium metabisulfite
• RCE side test 3: Forced Failure
• RCE side test 4: Fuse Burn Rate

Now that we've got a reasonable formula (surprise, it was pretty much what the internet suggested, although we found that dissolving the oxidizer was a more effective way of reducing the particle size) we're moving on to trying to make actual engines.