wezoAU Posted December 4, 2016 Posted December 4, 2016 (edited) Greetings I live in Australia and find it rather hard to obtain suitable convoluted tubes for my pyrotechnic needs, thus I am interested in building a manual tube rolling machine, or purchasing a reasonable priced, easy to use machine. If I was to build one does anyone have any designs or hints and tips that would make this easier. Here are some examples I found on the internet from "Mosquito Fire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFVgydU6n0&t=216s The above videos show a rather simple design, and I was wondering if anyone had any hints and or tips before proceeding making one, or a place to purchased one. Edited December 5, 2016 by wezoAU
calebkessinger Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 Gonna Try to tackle this idea here in the next month or so Wez. There are a couple other designs floating around and hopefully after looking at them all I can come up with something user friendly and reasonably priced. All us rocket guys would love to not be so dependent on a tube company.
NeighborJ Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 I made one of these over the summer and it was similar to wezos machine but I found that normal craft paper ended up wrinkling after it dried. This was because of too much glue and too thin paper. I like the scraper idea. I've found a silicon impregnated paper at HD which is slightly thinner than poster board and water resistant. This thicker, tougher paper has worked great and makes insainley strong tubes, tube supports are not an absolute must, the other up side is there is no need to wax the tubes due to the silicon film on the inside. The silicon also works awesome to prevent burn thrus on end burners. The only downside is a lengthy drying time (1 week)due to the water resistance and the silicon side doesn't grab the glue as well as craft but it still grabs good enough.
wezoAU Posted December 5, 2016 Author Posted December 5, 2016 Gonna Try to tackle this idea here in the next month or so Wez. There are a couple other designs floating around and hopefully after looking at them all I can come up with something user friendly and reasonably priced. All us rocket guys would love to not be so dependent on a tube company. That would be awesome if you could, I had already checked your store to see if you had already made something for it. It would be good if you could include a kit version or something, to reduce on shipping size for international buyers, its not cheap shipping to Australia. I made one of these over the summer and it was similar to wezos machine but I found that normal craft paper ended up wrinkling after it dried. This was because of too much glue and too thin paper. I like the scraper idea. I've found a silicon impregnated paper at HD which is slightly thinner than poster board and water resistant. This thicker, tougher paper has worked great and makes insainley strong tubes, tube supports are not an absolute must, the other up side is there is no need to wax the tubes due to the silicon film on the inside. The silicon also works awesome to prevent burn thrus on end burners. The only downside is a lengthy drying time (1 week)due to the water resistance and the silicon side doesn't grab the glue as well as craft but it still grabs good enough.I did forget to mention in my post above, but those videos listed are not my own, I take no credit for them, I was just giving a example of something I had found. Yes I have tried to hand roll a few of my own, and found out that they do indeed wrinkle a bit if you use excessive glue. My first attempt was with normal printer paper, and then I used some industrial masking paper. (The stuffed used to mask up cars/trucks before painting, amazing what you have left over from painting cars). The second attempt with the masking paper worked better, and gave me a usable tube. I could keep doing it and keep getting usable tubes, but it does take up a bit of time, and a lot of time to setup and then cleanup, and with work commitments I need things to be easy enough to do.
Col Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 (edited) Gonna Try to tackle this idea here in the next month or so Wez. There are a couple other designs floating around and hopefully after looking at them all I can come up with something user friendly and reasonably priced. All us rocket guys would love to not be so dependent on a tube company. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with Caleb My advice, for what its worth, is to use a fixed mandrel so you dont have to dismantle the machine to remove the tube as with Mosquito Fire`s design. Use at least 2 rollers to support the mandrel and dont use springs to provide tension because spring rate isnt linear, weight is better. Hopefully. it wont incorporate a big roll of paper that feeds directly to the mandrel Here`s a simple mechanism i came up with to move 2 (400mm x 30mm od stainless steel) rollers in unison.https://youtu.be/puPvlDbszcw I then modified the arm lengths to provide mechanical advantage and incorporate counterweights (40mm x 20mm steel bar) in the right places. A 3rd pair of arms carrying the mandrel end support bearings are actuated by a pin/curved slot arrangement in the arms. The support bearings had to engage with the mandrel before the rollers and remain engaged until the rollers are disengaged. Basically the mandrel support bearings are the first to arrive and the last to leave. The rollers and support bearings move out of the way so the finished tube can just slide off the mandrel. Using a watchmakers lathe chuck with a straight mandrel allows for any mandrel diameter upto at least 1.5". Edited December 5, 2016 by Col
calebkessinger Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 Thanks Col.Seems like you have worked through a bunch of the initial testing already.
OldMarine Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 I thought the paper needed to be cut across the grain and be calendared to get the proper length.
Col Posted December 5, 2016 Posted December 5, 2016 Aye, it does if you want the strongest tubes. Grain orientation affects the beam strength and dimensional stability of the tube,especially when using pure kraft. In tests,multi sheet parallel winding averages a 12-15% increase in burst strength over single sheet serial winding using identical paper length and glue. Serial winding is easier but a lot more tedious compared to parallel where you roll one multilayered sheet vs four sheets one after another 1
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