Everything I said to Jon about building my first rocket projects, which
there were maybe a dozen. Once I gained the experience, confidence and
knowledge of liquid rocketry I built a trailer mounted test stand with the
expectations that customers would surface needing test services for their
engines. Holy Molly did I underestimate my projection, that stand netted me
6, maybe 7, figures over 15 years. When I mentioned this to a colleague he
said to me
" Build it and they will come". And boy did they.
You can see this mobile test stand hot firing an LR-11 TCA of 1 metric ton
thrust somewhere at the link - neverworld.net
Ken
Ken
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 4:37 PM Jake Anderson <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
If you build the engine but don't finish the stand you will have learnt
a lot about building a rocket engine.
If you build the stand but don't finish the engine well, you built a
stand I guess.
If the engine you manage to build is different from the one you started
out trying to build the stand may not be suitable or may be a waste.
My vote for starting out is build the engine first. There's also going
to be long periods of dead time. If the engine is a reasonable first
engine a quick stand shouldn't be much more than
an I beam and some concrete in terms of stand specific build. (tanks and
valves can move)
On 2021-03-26 8:48 am, Jonathan Adams wrote:
For those of you with experience building and firing a
liquid-propellant rocket engine, plus the test stand and tanks, which
should come first in design and construction - the engine or the stand?
Construction, and spending the money to truly get started seems like
the point of no return (without losing money, at least), so my team
wanted to do this bit right.
The engine seems like it would be the hard part, so building that
first would get it out of the way. Beyond that, the test stand should
be much easier to build (or so we think).
But then there's also the issue that building the engine before you
have a test stand (that you know can support it) might be putting the
cart before the horse. It could also lead to issues where we find that
the test stand can't match what we designed the engine for.
If anyone can tell me from experience what the best way to go about
this would be, my team and I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.