Bottle Rocket Project
By Julia Larkins
About Lemon Toe
My rockets name is Lemon Toe. He weighs 169.4 grams and is 77.6 centimeters tall. The volume of pressure in my bottle is 2000 ml and the best volume of water for the launch is 600-700 ml.
Step 1
To make lemon toe there were a few steps. The first thing we did was cut another bottle so it could fit around the first. We cut the top and bottom off so we were left with a tube. We taped around it and also put three rings of tape around the rest of the bottle to make it stronger.
Step 2
The next thing we did was make fins and the parachute. For the fins, we cut out cereal boxes and drew and measured 6 triangles for our rocket. We attached each pair in the 6 triangles and then attached them onto the rocket with lots of tape. For the parachute we used a garbage bag. We cut holes in it and attached strings to the top of the bottle and to the parachute. With the second bottle that we added to our rocket, it gave us space to hold the rocket when it wasn't being used.
Step 3
To make the nose cone we took a piece of paper, a string, and a pencil and set them out. We held the string at the corner and someone else held the other end of the string and the pencil. They put the pencil behind it and pulled it across the paper and it made a curve. We cut along the curve and then rolled that piece of paper into the nose cone. We punched a hole in the bottle and the nose cone and connected the two using string. This meant when the parachute came out of the rocket, it would stay together.
Launching the rocket
When we launched our rocket, we were able to go two times. The first time we launched it did not go so well. The string between the rocket and nose cone ripped and the parachute barely came out. We had to reattach the string to keep it together and set the nose cone on lighter so the parachute will have an easier time coming off. The second time we launched, everything went a lot better and it worked. The parachute worked but the nose cone got ripped off of the bottle again. If we were to do it one more time, we should have used a lot of tape and tied it tighter and a few more times. We could have even used two pieces of string and if one broke the other would still hold it together. Another thing we could have done to make our rocket better is to make the strings to the parachute shorter. They may have made it harder for the parachute to come out because they got tangled easily and took too long to put in perfectly. You had to move them around so they would come out in the launch perfectly.