Friday 26 July 2024

HEXA Open Source Hexagonal Rocket

 



It's been a busy couple of weeks in the Concretedog lair! Numerous items have been restocked over on the Tindie store and a couple of new products have been released. The most notable though has been HEXA, my opensource hexagonal model rocket. 

A while ago I made some flat pack rockets for Hackspace magazine which had no tubes used in their construction. Whilst that was an interesting engineering experiment and produced some interesting rockets, it struck me that rocket kits without tubes are easier to mail!

HEXA is made from 3D printed parts and the hexagonal tubes are made up from 220gsm card stock using a cut and score technique which I have a small vinyl cutter machine doing so they turn out really crisp! 3D printing is obviously great for making parts but what's really useful here is you can print the nosecone with different amounts of infill to vary the weight to adjust the centre of gravity and stability of the rocket. At 20% infill the nosecone design prints to be around 10 grams in PLA and sets the CG perfectly, then, if you want to fly a payload in the upper section, like an altimeter you could print a second lighter nosecone to keep stability and weight optimised. Cool! 

Over on the project repository I've put together a 14 page PDF of documentation which covers building from the HEXA kit I am selling on Tindie, as well as tips and tricks for people creating their own HEXA from scratch. I've already seen some brilliant parts being printed where people are using a filament swap to make the nosecones look even more like pencils! The kits are complete with launch lugs and even a parachute kit for recovery, so, like many commercial model rocket kits, all you have to add is motors, wadding and launch gear. It flies really nicely on a B6-4 with plenty of altitude. 



Finally, I'm proud to say that I applied for and received OSHW certification for this project. In fact, it's the first OSHWA rocket ever to be certified! Hope to see more in the future.

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