Introduction

Welcome to the British Reaction Research blog. The purpose of these postings is to document the progress of my attempt to design and build a Liquid Fuelled Rocket Engine.

Here you will find information on my research, design and constructional activities towards this end. I am starting this blog rather late, as I am something like eighteen months into what I would regard as the intensive period of my R & D and constructional effort. So you will see that the first few posts will not be what might be described as contemporaneous; rather they will be an attempt to bring the reader up to speed with activities thus far.

A lot of people ask me why I would go to the trouble of spending large amounts of my free time (not to mention significant quantities of my residual income) designing and building a rocket engine. I hope to use these spare scribblings to try to explore this question and explain my motivation to research, calculate, design and construct.

I read somewhere once that building a small Liquid Fuelled Rocket Engine is perhaps the ultimate home engineering project. I wouldn't like to be drawn on that one. What I will say is that it encompasses a reasonable degree of skill and dexterity in machining, welding, fitting and problem solving. That is without going into the developmental work I have done in the field of electronics and microcontrollers, for data acquisition and control. Hence I'm hoping there'll be information on these topics that will prove useful to the amateur engineering community at large, not just those engaged in rocketry.

My next few posts will explore the history of my mad obsession and how I came to have so much machine shop and welding equipment in my garage that I struggle to get my bike in there, let alone a car.