Although these rockets are only fueled by one match head, they do get hot enough to burn fingers, and leave scorch marks in carpets. This project should not be attempted without adult supervision, and if done indoors, safety precautions should be in place to mitigate any fire hazards. Misuse, or careless use, may result in property damage. Use of this video content is at your own risk.

Background:

After seeing the video by Marek Hayward (which had 10,000 views at the time, and is now over 1,000,000!) I dropped everything I was doing to try this experiment.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get much success with it. The rockets only seemed to work about half the time, and the needle they were launching from would get coated in carbon and tar residues after only a couple of launches, which seriously affected the performance.

In addition, the rockets weren’t balanced, so once they fired, they wouldn’t shoot very straight.

It’s taken me over a year of prototyping and testing, and playing with different ideas to get the result you see in this video. I developed the idea into a full-on matchbox rocket launching kit, which I’m super proud of, and excited to share in the project video.

These rockets shoot consistently between 20-40 feet, and one of the biggest factors to whether the rockets work or fail, depends on how tight the crimp is on the rockets nose. Any rocket that has failed on me ha.