Barium nitrate safety

[Raceman17]

Hello everyone. I have a couple more questions. I've been doing this hobby extensively for a little over a month now. I have spent hours and hours reading on the forums to guide me in the correct direction.

So I have probably made 25-50 3 inch shells over the bast month. Everything homemade except for the visco fuse and paper hemisphere and tape. I started out with commercial airflot charcoal and made what I thought was some good powder. Then I read about the Cedar chip charcoal for BP and have made a few pounds of that Over the last week. It's definitely hotter. I have mostly been making charcoal based stars. So it's time to change it up a bit and I've decided to use the veline color system. I made a blue batch this weekend and primed them with fence post prime. I shot a star out a foot long section of pex tuning. Thanks for whoever made that suggestions. My star actually lit up like it was supposed too. Talk about excited!

 

So now comes the questions. Veline uses barium nitrate. Reading around the net I guess if u ate enough of it then it could kill you. I understand a clean work area and proper ppe when mixing the chemicals and making the stars. I will only be rolling my stars because I just think it's a heck of a lot easier to make 1000 stars in less than an hr that are all the same size if you sort them with screen. Cutting just doesn't look like that's the way I want to go.

So let's say I have all my chemicals premixed in zip lock bags. I go to roll these green barium stars: good canisters dust mask and latex gloves. I roll them to size using different sorting screens. Eventually I will have them all to the correct size to add the fence post prime. So my question.. Once the fence post prime is on the star and cured would the star be safe to handle at this point without any face mask airfilter or gloved hands? Like when you are placing the stars in the hemispheres. Should I have gloves on it for this operation since the have a cured layer of fence post prime on them anyway?

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[OldMarine]

Once the stars are primed you only need follow basic personal protection rules such as eye and skin protection and static, friction and impact avoidance. The barium can enter through damp skin (so I've read) so I still wear at least Latex gloves while handling. I also wear a simple dust mask while priming just to avoid black boogers.

I've been experimenting with white stars using barium nitrate and I've used the above without incident so far.

 

Edit: After priming and drying the stars are safe to handle unless you've used some exotic, toxic prime.

Edited August 10, 2016 by OldMarine

[dynomike1]

I handle it when making green stars and i am still here. When you see the dust just don't stick your head in and start snorting.

[Seymour]

Maybe I'm too casual, but I consider mild Barium poisoning to be not that big a deal. I'm not saying that I treat it without respect, but our bodies remove it relatively well, and unless you take in a LOT, it feels like a hangover.

 

Milling it and emptying the mill creates a big dust cloud and to be honest I like to leave the room and let it settle even though I am wearing a dust mask. I mixed 50kg of white strobe mix on one occasion and did the same thing, I just left the room when the dust got too much. Even a $100 + mask does not keep out all the dust. I bet I'm not the only one to have black snot after a solid session of screening charcoal while wearing one.

 

For mixing small batches (under 5kg) and handling mixed composition and stars I do not feel like any more precautions are required than those used for mixing and using other coloured star mixes (or glitter, strobe)

 

The "hangover" I described is from personal experience. In my teens I used to dissolve Barium carbonate in nitric acid, add enough water to dissolve it all, filter it and then boil it down. On one occasion I managed to breathe in a lot of the aerosol from boiling it, and also get a fair bit of hot, saturated solution on my ungloved hands multiple times, which had a fair few cuts, grazes and scratches. This kind of reckless stupidity is how you poison yourself enough to get to the "mild hangover" stage, which I think is a fair bit less than what is required to get seriously poisoned. I hope that this reckless stupidity is also much more exposure than everyone here gets.

[Wiley]

As Mike Swisher has mentioned several times, barium nitrate is far from the worst chemical we handle, and more importantly, it doesn't bioaccumulate like lead compounds do.

 

On another note, I wouldn't recommend starting with Veline colors. I really like the Spanish colors: http://www.amateurpyro.com/forums/files/file/108-english-conversion-from-spanish-jopetes/

 

I use Green #2, Blue #1, Orange #2, Lemon Yellow, and White Pearl. There are others on there that are all good as well. For my other colors, I like Buell Red, Yankie's Purple, and Mumbles' pink. They all can be bound with water/dextrin or parlon/acetone, make excellent cut stars, and all ignite easily when primed with FencePost prime at 60% of the star weight.

[memo]

Maybe I'm too casual, but I consider mild Barium poisoning to be not that big a deal. I'm not saying that I treat it without respect, but our bodies remove it relatively well, and unless you take in a LOT, it feels like a hangover.

 

Milling it and emptying the mill creates a big dust cloud and to be honest I like to leave the room and let it settle even though I am wearing a dust mask. I mixed 50kg of white strobe mix on one occasion and did the same thing, I just left the room when the dust got too much. Even a $100 + mask does not keep out all the dust. I bet I'm not the only one to have black snot after a solid session of screening charcoal while wearing one.

 

For mixing small batches (under 5kg) and handling mixed composition and stars I do not feel like any more precautions are required than those used for mixing and using other coloured star mixes (or glitter, strobe)

 

The "hangover" I described is from personal experience. In my teens I used to dissolve Barium carbonate in nitric acid, add enough water to dissolve it all, filter it and then boil it down. On one occasion I managed to breathe in a lot of the aerosol from boiling it, and also get a fair bit of hot, saturated solution on my ungloved hands multiple times, which had a fair few cuts, grazes and scratches. This kind of reckless stupidity is how you poison yourself enough to get to the "mild hangover" stage, which I think is a fair bit less than what is required to get seriously poisoned. I hope that this reckless stupidity is also much more exposure than everyone here gets.

 

a mild handover ? is that why I wake up feeling that.... always thought it was the beer . live and learn

 

 

memo

[Raceman17]

Thank you to everyone who took the time to reply. I will be taking a shot at making some green stars this evening after work!