Believe it or not, I actually got it to work the right way once.

For the NAR OOP motor program, I built a couple of minimal effort throwaways for the more questionable motors.

In the pic, the rocket with the orange nosecone in the back row had an AVI D6.1-0 booster cato. It bubbled the paint on the booster and removed the motor tube in the sustainer, IIRC, and charred its aft end, too. I glued another MMT into the sustainer and have continued flying it.

Doug

When your Saturn V implodes, explodes and is gone forever, you can call it CATO.......or just plain old "Oh S.........t!!!!!"

One of my old rocket buddies had an FSI Black Brant II that was his "throw away" rocket. We were into EX and he kept making progressively stronger and stronger motors for it. F's, G's, and even H's! Those motors never blew, even when we were fooling with "sledgehammer" motors with sub 1/2 second burn times and some serious chamber pressures. He even flew it on a 29mm H class motor with half the motor hanging out the back. For those of you who aren't familiar, the FSI kit had surface mounted balsa fins and a 2" body tube no heavier than a regular old Estes BT-70. The fins stayed on even with the sledgehammer motors! Ocassionally it would drift somewhere way down range where we couldn't find it. It never failed that somebody else would stumble across it the same day while looking for their own rocket. That thing tested a lot of wild motors and lived to tell the tale.

I was surprised when watching nasa TV that there is a desk at the space station control center labeled CATO -- it stands for Communication and tracking officer. It was strange seeing CATO at NASA, knowing what CATO means to us. Thank goodness it is a different cato!

Once again, for those hard of hearing, The NASA CATO is an acronym with the first letters of the words forming a new "word" (like NASA). Acronyms are in upper case letters.

The rocket motor failure known as a cato or Cato is an abbreviation for Catastrophic failure and is NEVER supposed to be spelled in all upper case letters. Doing so makes people think it is an acronym. (or that you are YELLING).

I do admit to typing it in all caps accidentally much more than I like, which is one reason for posting the expanation as often as possible....

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-Fred Shecter NAR 20117 (L2)
Southern California Rocket Association, NAR Section 430

That wasn't Jim Mitchell, was it ?

just curious as Jim and I go way back, and he was into 22mm reloads as well ( fit FSI kits ) .

I have an FSI NIke Smoke cone he has coveted for years...... lol

~ AL

Yep. We live a couple miles apart. Those little 22mm F motors sounded like a shotgun going off!

Were those Synerjet 22mm reloads?

If so, I bought all the D, E, F & G reloads they made plus the casings for each one.

Never fired one. Too much hassle to assemble. I spent about 40 minutes trying to get a D reload assembled.

Bob

They were EX motors. I pestered Jim to design something that would fit in 24mm rockets for years so I could cheaply fly some small stuff. The only thing holding him back was to find a cheap source of 24mm aluminum tubing. It was an odd size that would have to be ordered instead of having a local source. That meant it would be expensive. He finally decided to use some locally available 22mm tubing and designed the motors around that. After handling 76mm and 115mm motors, those little 22mm motor grains were super tiny!

Reloading these little guys were as simple as it gets. Jim was using snap rings to hold nozzles and bulkheads years before they became popular. The motors used two o-rings, two snap rings, a nozzle, and a bulkhead. We just took a bit of silicone grease and lubed up an o-ring for the nozzle, and one for the bulkhead. We always lightly lubed the outside of each grain to make the casing easy to clean too. Slip the nozzle in, slap in the snapring, drop in the grains, slip in the bulkhead and put the snapring in....you're done! Oh....the delay grain goes in the bulkhead and takes a few seconds to install. Dump a little BP in the top of the bulkhead and put a piece of tape over it for ejection. Now you're done. I flew his motors before I ever saw an Aerotech motor being assembled. I was amazed at how overly complex they were compared to Jim's simple design. I could prep a dozen of his motors before the guys with Aerotech motors could have a couple ready to fly. When I got into EX, I didn't have to do a lot of research because I had an expert right down the road from me.

I've never seen a Synerjet reloadable. Was it overly complicated?

I only saw them in 1991 at the Fall Danville. They, too, were snapring casings.

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Roy
nar12605