JTO Posted October 19, 2021 Posted October 19, 2021 (edited) This summer I tried to mill 500g or Mg shavings into fine powder, but after 3 weeks I gave up because the stuff is impossible to mill. I ended up with very coarse powder, like kids' sandbox sand. I though I might try it in some sparkle effects, so I made two test batches of stars where I replaced some of the Al in my white star composition, in one batch I replaced 25% of the Al and in the other 50%. Here is a video of the results, the 25% mix is in the left, the 50% mixture on the right. These are 1 gram stars, 5 in each tube. Any thoughts about this? I am a beginner. Al - very coarse Mg stars from Youtube.mp4 Edited October 19, 2021 by JTO
tortoise Posted October 20, 2021 Posted October 20, 2021 What white star formula did you use and what size star did you make?
sefrez Posted October 21, 2021 Posted October 21, 2021 It looks good. I can get a similar effect using potassium perchlorate, atomized aluminum -325 mesh and phenolic resin, with about 1-2% fast burning pine air float charcoal (to help with ignitability - it increases burn speed a little as well.) The phenolic resin acts as the binder. The star is basically a silver / white streamer. I'm assuming this is a modification to your chlorate based formulaI. Have actually done some experimenting with chlorates and aluminum as of recently. I was surprised to find that perchlorate in each case performed much better. Harder to ignite, but once ignited far better oxidation of the aluminum. Just basic tests so I can't say much, but my results were unexpected nonetheless. Obviously, if you are mixing magnesium and chlorate... be careful. At least here the magnesium is coarse. If it is the coarse that is doing the job, I'd sieve out the fines as they would be introducing unnecessary risk.
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