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See Mike, flintlocks are great fun! Shooting them is sort of like shooting pool. You dial in your load, line up your shot, take a breath and shoot. If you worked everything out correctly, you will hit your target. The whole process takes about five minutes. Flintlocks are particularly fussy firarms,...

Here I am target shooting ...

Thanks for the warm greetings, guys. I bought some steel pipe and fittings to make a water-tube boiler for my steam engine. I am probably going to build something in the spring.[/img]

So I have all this black powder and I have been thinking about building a small rocket with some. I would like to create an electical ignition system using perhaps a battery, a capacitor, and some sort of resistance-type heating element. Has anybody built something like this?

Sulfur is added to black powder mainly to reduce the temperature of ignition: http://www.musketeer.ch/blackpowder/recipe.html The sulfur makes the mixture less 'energetic' but easier to ignite. The saltpeter acts as the oxidizer and it is the charcoal that provides the 'power' in the mixture. One ca...

Hey guys! Just thought I would let you all know what combustion-related hobby has been occupying the time I formerly devoted to pulsejets ... shooting flintlock rifles! Flintlock rifles are great fun, powerful, accurate, and in Canada and the USA, completely unregulated. Black powder (the 'original'...

The bicycle rim is a box beam, albeit with a complex and often aerodynamic profile. Old wooden rims from 1930s racers show exactly the same profile as modern carbon fibre track rims. Larry, bicycle rims ARE rigid. Have you ever smacked somebody in the head with one? It hurts. Why? Because the rim do...

Consider this: The rim is a rigid hoop, but stresses left over from the manufacturing process combined with imperfections in the material mean that it will not lay straight and true unless held in position by numerous balanced forces. When the wheel is laying on its side, all the spokes should be in...

I agree on all points, Ed. Personally, I can hardly wait until the oil runs out and the inevitable massive die-back of the human race begins. I'm getting really tired of seeing oceans of people everywhere. The average human IQ will be shockingly low 80 years from now, but 200 years after that it wil...

Paul, I had a similar idea. I searched the net for pics of older motorbikes (circa 1920) for frame ideas. They seemed much more suited to home building than modern bikes, or even bikes from around WWII. You should be able to find all the motors and semi-conductors you need on E-Bay. I think an elect...

Well, at least everybody who speaks English is using the same letters now. Imagine the confusion when printers stopped using that 'f' without the crossbar and started using the letter 's'. Orthography is important, but it should be mentioned that many of the greatest men in Canadian history had terr...

Here is a general explanation of bicycle physics.

The author in the first link mentions the negetive effect of negetive trail. It would be not be a big deal to build a RWS bike that has positive trail. I'm glad I read that page. I had not thought of that. Damn, I just realized I put RWD in the other post and not RWS. I meant RWS.

A RWD bicycle would be a nightmare but a RWD tricycle would be a manageable vehicle I think, even at pulsejet induced speeds (40 -60 mph?). You could limit the angle through which the rear wheel is steered and that would help reduce spin-outs and mis-steering. You could put in some pulleys or someth...

Thanks, Mike! I think another reason rear-wheel steering is more difficult to control is because you are indirectly 'aiming' the front of the bike into the path you want it to take. With front-wheel steering, you point the front wheel where you want it to go, and that's where it goes. With rear-whee...