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This is a in-progress list of recent maker projects.
The Chip Can Challenge Rocket
Photos courtesy of Rob Heil
The Chip Can Challenge is intended for teams of rocketeers at intermediate to advanced levels to demonstrate their skills in designing and building rockets from scratch.
For several years now, the National Association of Rocketry’s (NAR) premiere secondary-school competition has been the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC.) While the competition has involved secondary school students across the country, and participants have gone on to careers in space-related jobs (including NASA’s astronaut corps,) the competition has some un-addressed issues (mostly related to costs) restricting the number and diversity of students and schools able and willing to participate.
At the suggestion of another NAR member, I proposed a competition for model rockets built out of a potato chip canister, as those associated with Pringle’s, and similar brands, used as the airframe for each teams’ rocket.
This spring (2025) I’m running the first Chip Can Challenge contest at LUNAR’s monthly launches.
In the spring of 2024, students in the Laney College Machine Technology program and I designed a prototype Chip Can Challenge rocket in Solidworks. I 3D printed parts (fin can and nose cone) as well as a laser cut motor mount and forward bulkhead from birch plywood, assembled two prototypes and flew them.
We solved several challenges in the process:
- Designing an ogive nose cone
- Using publicly available documentation as a guide
- Using Solidworks’ Equation Defined Curve feature to define the nose cone’s profile
- Accounting for 3D printed components
- Producing prototypes to learn how to account for shrinkage of PLA filament parts
- Managing weight and the center of gravity (CG must be ahead of the rocket’s center of pressure.)
- Designing the fin can as an open structure instead of a continuous cylinder to reduce its weight and move the rocket’s center of gravity forward
My files for printing 3D parts for Pringle’s can rockets are available on printables.com: