My son Max turned 4 yesterday. We had a rocket-themed birthday party for him so I found some instructions on the internet on how to make a water rocket. I'm not much of a handy man but this looked like an easy enough project. The results were somewhat disappointing for me, but luckily 4 year old boys are pretty easily impressed and it was a pretty big hit:
Launch I
Launch II
It looks like the seal at the mouth of the water bottle needed to be tighter and we were going a little overboard on the air pressure. The seal at the top was formed by heating up the PVC pipe with a candle until it became flexible, then pushing inward on both sides to create a bulge. The bulge I made was off to the side a little bit so I'm not surprised that caused a problem. I think if we could have figured out just the right amount of air pressure before it broke the seal we could have gotten a pretty decent launch. So I'm hoping to use it again in the near future to see if we can get better results. If we can't, it was easy enough to make that I'd like to try again, maybe when Max is a little older and can help build it.
Overall it was a fun experience and educational. It definitely made me want to find other projects to work on.
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