Reyst bottle

[James Kidder]

I just completed a test to see if the Reyst concept was easily attainable. I took a soup can and made an irregular hole about the size of a penny. I poured in three teaspoons of denature alcohol and lit it. The alcohol on the top quickly burst into flame and then a steady flame proceeded from inside the can. What went wrong?

[steve]

a penny? too big. try a smaller hole (dime maybe) also you want it to be as round as possible.

try using methanol for fuel (ask for "Heet" at an automotive store)

[Mark]

Use a quart or pint sized jar and a half inch hole or 7/16ths in the lid. And be sure to use methanol. Nothing hard about that. And stay away from soup cans, use glass jars to get a feel for the characteristics. Glass jars are more forgiving and easier to master.
Mark

[Mark]

Soup cans rust incredibly fast, and they usually have laquer coatings that must be burned off with a propane torch or taken off with some kind of solvent. The laquer smokes as soon as the can starts to get hot and then your jam can is dead in the water before you know it.
And airing out a can is a lot harder than airing out a jar with a lid, and you can see the fire with a jar. And as mentioned before, use methanol and make a neat round hole.
I think because the top and bottom of a can is flexible, it really dampens the vitality of pulsating combustion. With a jar, you only have one flat surface flexing, unlike a can that has two flexing surfaces and probably slightly out of sync, retarding the feedback.
Mark

[yipster]

dont know why i had trouble before and just letting you all know my jam jars fire up without a problem now on RC doped methanol. tried a few jars and its amazing fun allrite. i imagine there is some thust in the whoosh but the rattling reaction dies out before it breaks the bottles. anyway, i'm saving bottles now for when i got some more time.