Easy Blue Strobe Stars

[untitled]

After roughly a month and a half, I've come up with a blue strobe star formula that uses somewhat readily available chemicals and works well.

Here is is!
Ammonium Perchlorate - 0.25
Guanidine Nitrate - 0.55
Copper Carbonate - 0.2
Magnalium, -200 mesh - 0.05
(Important: the formula adds to 1.05)

Notes:

Screen mix. Wet with NC lacquer. Do not use water. I tried and the comp began heating up. Also another note on safety: I did not perform any sensitivity tests on this comp. Use it at your own risk. Personally, I pump these stars. They can be pumped with barely any of the NC lacquer in the comp. I prime using a BP +5% phenolic resin and +5% MgAl slurry in denatured alcohol and then just dip them in some of the dry prime powder. They burn quite slow so don't pump very long stars. You can change the +5% MgAl in the comp with +10% MgAl if you want a faster strobe though I prefer the +5%. The Ammonium Perchlorate is 90 micron from FireworksCookbook. The Guanidine Nitrate is also from FireworksCookbook. The Copper Carbonate was synthesized from sodium bicarbonate and copper sulfate solutions, but I'm sure you could use the commerical stuff too. Also, if you do synthesize it yourself, you must wash the product several times with water to remove any sodium impurities. Finally, the MgAl was also bought from FireworksCookbook.

Here is a video comparing the formula with no MgAl, +5%, and +10%.

If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know! I'd love to see these stars in a shell, but currently don't have the room on my property to shoot one. Thanks for reading. Edited July 25, 2019 by untitled

[untitled]

I forgot to include this originally and it may be important, but I won't know until someone else tries this formula with commercial copper carbonate. The copper carbonate I made was washed with water a total of 9 times in the vacuum filter. After this, I scraped it out and onto a paper plate to dry. Once it dried and was crumbly, I crushed it with a plastic spoon and pushed it through a kitchen sieve. After this "granulation", I did not powder the copper carbonate any further and just used it as is in my testing. If you try this formula with the commercial finely powder copper carbonate and it doesn't work, I would recommend you wet it with some water, let it dry into one mass, and crush it using the same method I used. Sorry I forgot to mention this.

[pyrojig]

I would like to try this mix. Curious about your priming . Was it some type of glitter or metal comp.?:or a actual perch based strobe prime.

I just don't want to end up with a blue star vs a strobe .

[pyrojig]

Has anyone else tried this comp with any luck?

[TheWorkingsOfFire]

Has anyone else tried this comp with any luck?

I just got done making a 500 g batch with this recipe and from my experience it seems to burn several different shades of blue and then occasionally pops out a bright orange color from the magnalium. I have video but not sure how to upload it. Overall I would say it is a great formula and must have taken a while with a lot of hard work involved to come up with it and it does look great! All my chemicals came from fireworks cookbook.com and I also tried a small batch with finer magnalium and this large batch with coarse magnalium. The finer it seems the better

[TheWorkingsOfFire]

The finer magnalium produced less orange Sparks and more vibrant blue

[TheWorkingsOfFire]

Oh and I forgot I used 5% magnalium in my batches. I primed with a slow burning (BP)+silicon prime. The silicon forms a molten bead that glows red hot and sticks to the star to ensure the star burns all the way through. Really good general use prime for almost every kind of star

Even ones that don't like to stay lit as it flies through the air. You can find the formula on YouTube as the prime that works every time color star prime