Make your own water bottle rocket launcher! - Part 2 of 3

all right one of the first steps you need to do is get your valve stem through your halfin hole now do that it's really easy put it from the inside of your uh end cap to the outside and then you're going to need to pull it through and that's what the Pliers are for it also helps if you have a rag so that you can grab without Maring up your um valve stem and you just want to pull that and force it through it may take a little work once you get it all the way

through there's a a little Rim you'll see pop out you can check by continuing to pull and it should be well seated within the endcap and that'll now hold the pressure that you need to launch the rocket now this is what we'll be building next this is half of the base of your launcher I'm going to show you how to build one real quick if you've never used uh PVC cement before basically what you do is put just a little bit of this purple primer on here now this stuff smells really bad and it's you

want to do it either in a well ventilated area or it's best and easiest to just do it outside cuz it can also drip and make a bit of a mess once you got you have the primer on it'll dry fairly quickly and you can add some cement it doesn't take much but you do want to coat it all the way around and then you'll put on one of your end caps and twist it about A4 turn and you'll fill it lock and it'll get to where you can't even move it fairly quickly and that'll

make the seill and that's the basis of of putting the pipe together what you want to do is put an end cap on two pieces you can see here that one of these has my valve stem in it it doesn't matter where that piece ends up now because you don't want the glue to clog your valve stem tip the PVC downward like this as it dries so that any extra glue will drip out rather than in your fitting and then last we'll glue a te between these two pieces as we did over here and put

an additional piece in that tea and that's how you make your two t [Music] sections all right the next thing we want to do is put a slight bulge in our long piece of PVC this will be what the the water bottle seals against when you go to launch it so what you're going to do is get out your candle if you have one or have someone else hold the lighter for just a few minutes I'll light my candle here and again make sure you do this in an area that's away from anything that's flammable

and also well ventilated apparrently it's too well ventilated cuz the candle doesn't want to stay lit all right we're having a hard time keeping our candle lit so I'm going to have a buddy hold the lighter for me and we'll show you how this is [Music] done you want to be patient and keep rotating this we heat it up you need the entire circumference to be warm that'll make the PVC pliable we've got that reference line at 10 in so that we know we're in the right spot and don't touch the PVC too nearly where

you're where you're heating it looks like it's soft enough I'm just going to take and put pressure on that while it cools and you can see it puts a slight bulge in it continue to hold that and try to keep the PVC as straight as possible and as that cools that bulge will become permanent and you only need it to be ever so slight because the the diameter of the PVC is already nearly perfect to to seal against the bottle see as that cools it becomes rigid again that's how you get the seal here we

have our long section of pipe and we just showed you how to put the Bulge in it now that we've done that we want to continue building our launch platform uh you want to make sure that the the end from which you measure 10 in is upward and then we're going to glue it down to this third T that we' [Music] had and that's our main launch rail all right the next step now is to glue one of our te's to our launch rail now I forgot to mention earlier but while you're getting this bulge

in your launch rail you may want to grab your bottle and check that it makes a good [Music] seal we've done that and it looks good so now we're ready to glue it here now what we're going to do is use our Square to help us get this perfectly vertical or nearly so it doesn't have to be exact H in fact if if you want you can put a slight angle in it to have your rocket launch a little bit farther down range but I'm going to do mine vertical today so I'm real quickly going

to add cement and because it dries fairly fast I'm going to have to put that on rotate it a quarter turn and then hold it vertical while it dries I'm going to go ahead and do that you want to do that on a nice flat surface so you can see that it's vertical as you can see we're pretty close definitely close enough so now we'll let that dry for just a second and then we'll add on our second tea all right now we want to put in our te that has the valve stem in it

and attach it to our laun tril now if you have a preference make sure that you turn this to whichever side you want it on it really doesn't matter at this point now you want to do this on a flat surface so that your two T's are nice and flat and square give that an extra minute to dry uh while we move on to some of the other steps all right the next step is to make your trigger mechanism the way we're going to do that is use these wire ties to grab onto this flange

of the bottle when it's on the lro now this is just a scrap piece of PVC I have uh you can use your Lun or any other piece of 1/2 in PVC for this next step we're just going to use it as a reference you'll also need some duct tape permanent marker six medium zip ties and it's helpful to have a ruler so what we're going to do first is take a piece long enough it'll fit around the tube at least once we're just going to wrap that all the way around and lay it back

on itself and then we're just going to Mark with our permanent marker where those two where that end meets to rest of the tape then we'll pull that off and that's our reference for the uh circumference of the pipe then we'll set that aside what we want to do is use these zip ties and we're going to lay them with the large end facing up from the table and we're going to put one right at our Mark and you want to go most of the way down the zip tie now we'll clip this at the

end but you want a good 5 in or so here and then what you want to do is put a second one at the other end and you can use this ruler to help you keep them aligned well so that they all uh fit against the flange evenly and you're going to try to to space these evenly all six of them across the duct C Next Step before we put our zip ties on the launch row we're going to take this uh band clamp use your flathead screwdriver to loosen it all the way so you

can slide it down on your launch tril then we're going to take our 2 L bottle that we'll eventually use as a rocket and slide it over now you want to seat it on the Bulge Don't Force It On farther than it needs to go just push it down until it feels like it's a good seal and we're going to use that as a reference height you'll now take your zip ties which you've lined up with the ruler on your duct tape and we're going to wrap those around we're going to slide those down till

they just sit right on uh the that lip that flange on the bottle and then once you get it to where it sits just right you'll wrap your duct tape around and stick it to the launch vill right there now you want to take your extra 2 L bottle and we're going to use this as a spring for our launch mechanism what you want to do is if you have a box cutter it helps to get a slit started with that then once that's once you've cut into the bottle you go and cut it around

we're going to go ahead and use our Sharpie or other permanent marker with our uh 1 and a/4 inch couple and we're going to take this and put it roughly in the center and what you want to do is Trace the inside of that onto your spring then we're going to take a spare piece of pipe or you can turn your rocket launcher upside down and use it and we're going to trace on the other end the outside of your 1/2 in pipe then on the small circle we want to trace another extra 1 in

or so around that cuz it's going to need to fit over the zip ties as well and then lastly draw a line down the center so now we're going to cut out our circles start with the top one as you can see I put a slit in it by doing this that will help let get our scissors in and you're just going to cut this out and there we go we have the big hole done now the smaller hole we don't want to cut out the entire circle what we want to do is cut it

into semicircles but we're going to leave a little portion in the middle so that our flap hangs down now you'll see that there's a flap and that'll hold our spring in place in the band clamp I'll go ahead and cut the other side here so the next step is to take our spring and slide it over our launch rail now if these zip ties won't fit through this hole you can widen it a little bit and we'll go ahead and slide it down then what we want to do is pull our spring down and then

we're going to fasten or our band clamp over these flat these little flaps that we've left hanging down from our spring this fitting which is the release mechanism will slip over top and this spring will keep it up in a safe position holding the rocket onto the launch rail until we pull it down so I'll go ahead and and fasten this band clamp so now to make our firing mechanism we uh take that 1 and a/4 in coupling and drill a small hole now I've drilled a 1/8 in hole it's really easy to do in

PVC cuz it's so soft and then you're going to take your nylon string and thread it through that hole and tie it off now it likes to fray so it helps to warm the end with a match or lighter just to seal it off once you get that tied on there good we're going to put it over our launch rail over the zip ties and you'll see see that it sits on this spring now and then take your string and thread it down through both holes and it should fit through both of them easily because

they were able to fit over the zip ties and you're going to thread that down through both holes and then that will be what we pull on to launch the rocket now what I typically do is just run it under one side of the PVC and then you can see that if you stand to this side of the rocket and pull your fire mechanism releases now that the launcher is done to fire a rocket simply put your bottle over the launch ra pull down on your firing mechanism till you get the rocket seated and the

zip ties are over the flange and your spring should hold it up firmly against the rocket to keep it from firing while you pressurize it hook a bik bike pump up to your um valve stem and then you're ready to fire just by pulling the string and you'll see that it's really easy to do well we've enjoyed having you and showing you how to build a a water bottle rocket launcher please check us out on on Facebook and Twitter and feel free to post any questions you might have to our Facebook account or in the

uh comments below glad to have you with us and we'll see you next time