Many years ago, when I was around 11 years old, I embarked on my first real DIY project. This was before any drones, 3D printing, or anything else. My cousin, two years older than me, had come to the U.S from India. It was the middle of summer and both of were extremely bored. After seeing a video from the Make Magazine Youtube channel about a compressed air rocket, we decided to try and build it (many other DIY Youtube channels have done this same project since). The design seemed simple enough - a PVC pipe air chamber with a bicycle tire valve using a sprinkler pipe electronic valve controller to release the air pressure and a small projectile. Using the video as a guide, my cousin and I took a trip to our local Home Depot and purchased everything we needed. Our PVC pipes weren't the same size as those in the video, but we figured that the whole thing would be fine. We also found some scrap wood to construct a structure around the PVC components to support the whole thing. Building the frame and installing the valve controller were the easy parts of the project, but adding the bicycle tire valve and actually switching the valve controller on and off were some of the challenges we encountered. I had an old bike tire that I used to get the valve. It took some time to find a proper adhesive to make the tire valve-PVC connection airtight. We settled on using JB Weld to secure the tire valve to the PVC pipe after drilling a hole. Next, we focused on controlling the sprinkler valve. There were no switches or anything else included in the box, so we had to improvise. After searching the garage for some time, we found an old light switch and decided to use it. To power the whole circuit, we used a 9V battery. Wiring the whole setup took a while, as I didn't have a soldering iron (and I didn't know how to solder) and I wasn't too familiar with electronics at the time. After making sure the PVC was airtight and the valve controller functioned correctly, my cousin and I worked on making a projectile. We carved a wooden dowel into a torpedo-like shape and sanded it a bit. Some duct tape was added to the mid-section to make sure that it fit snugly into the top of the PVC launching pipe. To fill the air chamber up, we simply hooked up a bike pump to the tire valve and pumped until the pressure was around 60 psi. Surprisingly, the first time we launched the projectile, everything went as planned. The wooden rocket shot up extremely fast, maybe to around 100-200 feet. This project really motivated me to try others and was essentially my introduction to the DIY space. I actually made a video about this compressed air rocket around the time I built it. Click here to watch it (keep in mind that it was filmed on an iPhone 4 and edited on iMovie by an 11 year old).
