Depends on goals and size?
Can build motor, and skip the test stand like many early amateurs?
Just stand motor up vertically on bathroom scale, fire, and record results on
video.
Then after you blow everything up, and have learned how NOT to make motor; and
build another.
Bathroom scales are cheap. LOL joke.
IMHO - First timers should find friend/mentor or join a club with test stand.
This reduces the costs, time burden, and provides much needed advice from other
rocket folks.
A reliable repeatable test stand is a major project.
Making the metal hardware for test stand is not hard. The challenge is sensor,
designing in mechanical overload protection for sensor, heat/blast protection,
calibration of sensor & data acquisition software. Might even have to write
some code? Hardest part about motor test stand, is you need to find a way to
TEST the test stand, BEFORE you commit your expensive motor to testing.
Best Luck.
Jim
On March 25, 2021 at 2:48 PM Jonathan Adams <jonadams2002@xxxxxxxxx> 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.