Mouse boiling and rocket testing

Julia and I undertook parallel projects on Sunday afternoon.

Having found a deceased young mouse on my doorstep (thanks to the local cat community) we decided to try to extract its skeleton for display purposes – possibly rampant with acorns argent. The methodology was to boil it with caustic soda to remove the flesh and degrease the bones then reassemble it using fuse wire.

We got the unfortunate rodent to a rolling boil and then reduced him to a simmer. After a couple of hours the fur was off and some of the guts were gone but the little gent was otherwise complete. Having run out of bottled gas we had to decant him into pure water so that we could continue the process indoors. A further hour passed and Julia decided to extract our whiskery chum for examination. Weirdly the pan was bare and nothing but mouse stock remained. We had either over boiled him or he had ascended to the happy land of nuts – I choose to believe that latter. More road kill news soon.

I blog this second item with trepidation as my street is probably under observation by ‘The Man’ but our next experiment was genuinely rocket science. The idea was to produce a proof-of-concept rocket for the forthcoming Nelmes Institute of Science moon shot.

I used a plastic bottle (harvested from the guerrilla garden and provided by the Bletchley littering scum) as the body of the ‘rocket’; water as the propellant and a bicycle track pump was used to pressurise and actuate the 'module'. Essentially the bottle is stopped with a cork through which a bicycle inner tube valve has been inserted. 

The track pump is then attached to the valve and the bottle charged with air. Once a critical pressure is reached the cork is blown out and Newton’s Third Law of Motion kicks in.

The bottle rocket ended up stuck under the hedge (about 6m away) but there is real potential here. More news of Nelmes Explorer II soon.