The series of photos that you have been seeing here on Team Phoenicia's blog are NOT the making of a shower head. We will not be launching a test article for a lunar astronaut shower on or GLXP lander, Storming the High Heavens. Rather this is an injector plate for a small rocket engine. We will be using these in tests and we will be providing them to our team's clients. The first delivery of the above is in June.

Making them has been an interesting challenge. The design is, in fact, rocket science and so given the touchiness of that subject, we will not be walking you through the calculations to produce the above. However, some of the most challenging aspects of the work was not its design. Any machinist will tell you that you can slap together almost anything in a CAD program. However, it may or may not actually be possible to make it. Even with modern CNC machines.

When we design a part, we had it over to James, the team's manufacturing lead, and he fusses with it and works out the order of operations. He will often then turn around and make the part manually for the first one or so. If we have a large number of them, we will work out the gcode once we have examples to make sure that they work as planned. The first four we have done are all on manual mills and lathes. Any further orders will be done on CNC equipment.

James' biggest challenge has been the work holding:

The most challenging aspect so far has been drilling the injector pairs at the required angles. The size of the holes and the angle makes spotting difficult. The solution was to cut chamfers on the lathe where the injector holes meet the thrust chamber. This also has the added benefit of producing a round orifice rather than an elliptical one, and that makes deburring the edge of the hole much easier.

The work holding of the injector plates and the indexing of the holes required some special consideration as well. As it happens 32, 16, and 8 do not divide evenly into 360 degrees, and my 5C-Spin Index fixture is not capable of minutes and seconds divisions. Therefore, I had to make the decision of buying a dividing head or making my own indexing plate. I chose the latter. As our funding increases better tooling will become available and production will increase. In the meantime the best strategy is to remain mentally flexible, and be prepared to meet any challenge with the tools we have now.

Based on the inspections done on the parts that he has turned out, we definitely have someone that can make the tools to make the tools to make the rocket engines. For those that are interested, the thrust chambers that will be paired with the above injector plates are here. The accompanying manifolds are in-progress. We will probably post a picture on our regular blog, but not here lest we be accused of 'zombie posting.'

For those that are interested and are US citizens, we can bend you metal. Proceeds go to our GLXP entry. Feel free to contact us.