Ned's Nitrated Baggie Method for Charcoal Stars

[Wiley]

This looks to be a neat method for making stars:

 

Would it be possible to make pulverone (flammable filler/burst for cylinder shells) using this method? Instead of putting the comp in a bag, it would be simply granulated through a kitchen sieve (about 10 mesh) and popped into a food dehydrator to dry.

 

The only reason I ask is because my nitrate is crystalline and my only means of powdering it is grinding it in a coffee grinder and passing it through a 100 mesh screen, which is quite tedious (takes exactly one hour to mill 2 lbs of nitrate).

Edited February 28, 2015 by Wiley

[calebkessinger]

Your coffee grinder must be junk!!! or some of us aren't really using 100 mesh screens.... which is probably the case..

and what you are really talking about is making it the hard way... it won't really be any better powder this way. probably worse..

Your best bet is alcohol granulated bp.. , but it's only gonna be so fast without ball milling it.

 

oh, that is a great way to make stars!!!

Edited February 28, 2015 by calebkessinger

[Wiley]

It might be. It's just the Walmart unit that Ned used in a couple of his tutorials. The only reason I'm interested in the method for making pulverone is so I don't have to grind all that nitrate. I certainly could, but its a pain to be sure. Also, since I'm making cylinder shells, I need rock hard granules, so I'd be granulating it with dextrin.

[mikeee]

Who is this Ned guy that you speak of, and where does he reside?

That is a good method for processing comps, have been using that method for several years.

Gives you plenty of time to get the components mixed without the liquids drying.

[Wiley]

I'm going to try it for making pulverone using my crystaline/lumpy nitrate this afternoon. I'll just have to see how it goes. Might even make some gold streamer stars too.

[db5086]

Ned Gorski. Quite the character and very informative. I believe he's from Ohio. Runs a pay for pyro website called fireworking. Writes stuff for skylighter and posts a ton of stuff on youtube for the pyro community.

[calebkessinger]

hmmm.... ned gorski...

is he like The Wizard??

[mikeee]

Well this Ned Gorski character seems to have a large number of video's on YouTube that provide plenty of tutorials

on making pyrotechnic compounds, items and tools.

 

Looks like he might have been doing this pyro stuff for a while now.

[calebkessinger]

I suppose one could chat with him if you were on his site!! kinda like a club!!

[pyroman2498]

Willey , for pulverone the nitrate you have will work well just brake the clumps up with wood dowl or your hands and you should be fine, run your mix through a kitchen screen a Cupple times to make sure everything is mixed , but you don't need milled nitrate for pulverone.

Would milled Nitrate be better ? Yes but use what you have

 

Stay Safe and Stay Green,

 

~Steven

Edited February 28, 2015 by pyroman2498

[gregh]

I think I heard somewhere that Ned has invented most of what we do. I think it was FlaMtnBkr...

 

Just kidding... Hope all is well with the little one!

[FlaMtnBkr]

I don't make cylinder shells but from what I understand pulverone is mainly a filler and doesn't need to be powerful. So it doesn't need to be real fast and granular nitrate should work fine. But you will need faster BP for burst and lift which will need fine nitrate and really a ball mill.

[braddsn]

Wiley, my .02 worth, get a ball mill for sure! A lot of my chems come to me in granular form like you are talking about, my KNO3 always does. I toss it in the ball mill for 30 minutes and then I have a fine powder. Even the 60 dollar HF mill will do fine!

[nater]

I don't make cylinder shells but from what I understand pulverone is mainly a filler and doesn't need to be powerful. So it doesn't need to be real fast and granular nitrate should work fine. But you will need faster BP for burst and lift which will need fine nitrate and really a ball mill.

I always keep milled potassium nitrate around and use it. If one follows Mike Swisher's instructions to make polverone with boiling water, he says you can use the nitrate straight out of the bag. It is possible that he buys something besides fertilizer grade nitrate, but I think the hot method dissolves the nitrate. I use the same method to make nitrated charcoal for candle delay and can confirm that it works well with my nitrate straight from the bag. I use Haifa brand and it looks like salt.

 

Edit to add: This baggie mixed star method was first talked about by Dave F.

Edited March 1, 2015 by nater

[Wiley]

Well, I made pulverone by dissolving my nitrate in boiling water, then stirring in the other ingredients (previously screened together with a 20 mesh screen). I used 30% of the total comp weight in water, so that made thick black soup. Stirred it continuously and in about 10 or 15 minutes it had lost enough water that I could granulate it. Used a 15 mesh kitchen sieve to granulate it, then put it in my food dehydrator. The granules were fully dry after 9 hours, and I passed them back through that sieve to break them up. In the process, some granules that had stuck back together were too big to fit through the sieve, and refused to be broken up easily. Looks to be about 2FA grade. The fine powder that I intended to make was a little fragile, but these larger grains were very strong. I'm going to granulate it through 1/4" hardware cloth and see how that goes.

 

I put 10g of that "2FA" in a lift maroon (made like a squat color shell, spiked with 16 verticals of doubled up #3 crochet thread, and spiked horizontally as well), taped it to a 135g cylinder loaded with kitty litter, and fired it from a fiberglass consumer tube. Got a little over 9 seconds of total flight time. Much higher than it needed to go.

 

Edit: My nitrate was granular "stump remover" that dissolved into a clear yellowish liquid due to impurities, but it worked just fine.

Edited March 1, 2015 by Wiley

[Mumbles]

If you regranulate before the composition is fully dry, you will get a lot more of the product size you want. I started doing this for stuff I intend to use for polverone, and also for lift/break grade BP. It's hard to describe in text, but basically you put the granulated product on the screen and sort of roll the product around on top of the screen. This will both break up the larger agglomorated stuff, help to consolidate the properly sized stuff, and fuse the finer material into the larger granules. I'd suggest granulating once every 30-60 minutes. I'll normally do 2 or so regranulations before the final drying. I granulate through a 4 mesh screen and get about 70% 2FA, 20% 4FA, and 5% fines. That's only 95% by the way. There is some variation.

 

I have used coarsely ground nitrate for polverone. My nitrate was prilled, which was a total pain in the butt. For polverone, I'd grind to -40mesh or so, which is about like table salt. For compositions I'd use -60 mesh, or ball mill some coarsely ground material for about 20 minutes to powder it all. My mill didn't efficiently handle the prills as-is. I used a food blender to grind everything. Like you, using a coffee grinder was not an acceptable option. I personally think anyone who claims that a coffee grinder gives all -100 mesh powder is full of it, or has never actually screened their nitrate. Perhaps my coffee grinder sucked, or the prills had extra hard material in them.

[calebkessinger]

When you are using one of skylighters round screens marked 80 mesh that are actually more like 50 mesh.. It falls right through!!!!! I don't even have a 100 mesh screen...

[Wiley]

Thanks for the info Mumbles. I did actually regranulate the powder, but only once, and some of it obviously stuck back together. Though I'm regarding that as a good thing because now I finally experienced the reasons why the coarse stuff is so important for cylinder shells.

Edited March 2, 2015 by Wiley

[Mumbles]

The first two granulations are usually kind of sticky for me. It's the 3rd and possibly 4th that it kind of just falls through.

 

For cylinder polverone I use +6, -6+16, and -16+30. The 2FA and 4FA sizes I mentioned before aren't really correct. It's really approximately 2 and 3FA, then 2Fg to be entirely accurate. I use the +6 instead of +4 just to get more coarser stuff to level off shells. I wasn't getting quite enough before. As you found, you can increase this amount just by getting it a little wetter or re-granulating less.

[Wiley]

I made another batch tonight but granulated it through a 4 mesh screen. I dissolved the nitrate in enough water to make black soup when the screened/shaken fuel ingredients were added. I let it sit and stirred it occasionally and it got pretty thick after a while, but still gooey. I granulated it through my screen 4 times and that dried it to the point that I had a nice dense putty ball that glistened a little bit, just like Nedski says it should. However, when I then rubbed it through my screen, the comp had a tendency to crumble rather than stay in nice grains. When I regranulated it after about an hour of drying, it did seem like there more granules in there, but it still seemed less consolidated than I thought it should be. Should I granulate it wetter, let it stick together, then regranulate before it hardens to get good dense granules?

 

EDIT: I may also re-wet the fines (or just the small granules) with boiling water and re-granulate through the 4 mesh.

Edited March 2, 2015 by Wiley