How ro do you roll stars without cores

[Pyrophoric30]

Hello pyros, how do you roll your stars without core? Is it even possible? I used tapioca pearls as core but im having a problem. When the tapioca pearls absorbs water, it starts growing making drying stars crack into half when it is not dried fast enough. 

i got a star pump plate but i cannot layer effects on those.

[Arthur]

One of the classic methods was to simply put the first mixture in the star roller and tumble it to mix it. Then lightly spritz water from a sprayer so that droplets start to clump really tiny star centres from the mix itself, then keep tumbling with a fine mist spray until these cores start to grow. 

Lots of the old firework makers used to have lots of different spray bottles that they had selected for their spray or mist qualities. If you spray really tiny droplets then you form star cores, if you spray a ultra fine mist you build comp onto a core.

However you work screen out the stars often so that none grow too big and the powder is all used.

All possible variables change the product, in particular wind and humidity on the day.

Edited June 14 by Arthur
spling

[deepakpyro]

One of the best way I follow is that, have a core which is made up of same star composition. 

Personally, i would take 200gms of star mix and wet to make as dough and press across 12 mesh to get sieved out pasta. Dust with some dry powder and pass it again through 12 mesh horizontally to make small cubes. You will get small cubes about 2~3mm with small stars and few amount of powdered mix also, you can further sieve to seperate it and use only cubes to throw into the star roller to make core with small spray of water and dry mix. Firstly use only dry powder and cubes in star roller which can roll cube into a somewhat spherical shape, further use spray and dry mix to get uniform size. You can use that immediately to further roll or dry it for a day and use it as star core.

 

[Zumber]

22 hours ago, Pyrophoric30 said:

Hello pyros, how do you roll your stars without core? Is it even possible? I used tapioca pearls as core but im having a problem. When the tapioca pearls absorbs water, it starts growing making drying stars crack into half when it is not dried fast enough. 

i got a star pump plate but i cannot layer effects on those.

Try to find out grains like millet seeds and work on wait and roll technique.

Means dont roll stars at night remember you have to dry out stars faster so work on day time in hot sunshine.....just roll stars having millet seed as a core or any other suitable core .....once few mm composition layer has finished dry out stars immediately for hour or two then work again .....continue this process until you get desire diameter.

[Zumber]

I am agree with coreless star rolling technique as deepakpyro said......but I rather work faster...... insted of adding composition to small stars say 2 mm to grow it big say 10 mm it will take too much time......

I damp composition with solvent...

Knead mixture  then I add some dry composition over it and seperate composition with fingers so that there will be 8 mm plus lumps ....then I pour little dry composition to avoid lumps to stick together.....then I roll it using dry composition .....then I screen stars using 8 mm hole size sieve (I have different screens to seperate stars)

I break bigger lumps over same screen not by kneading but by breaking single star into 2 or 3 parts using fingers......this operation is done until all bigger lumps to pass 8 mm sieve....again I roll stars to get 10 mm size using solvent spray and dry composition..... Then I sieve stars by  two or three different size sieve say 6 mm 8 mm and 10 mm sieve and keep stars separate which are exact size ..... I break star bigger than 10 mm and roll it again....I dont break star and I roll stars that are smaller than 10 mm......

[Arthur]

It's easy to hand form just a few stars but the use of a large (think cement mixer!) star roller will allow the manufacture of stars in batches between 25pounds and 25 kilos.

With care you can roll stars with two or three comps and get colour changes, all in one mixer -then of course you have a lot of stars to dry.

[Arthur]

Given a star plate, you could put one colour in the holes, press lightly, then put a second colour on top and press correctly hard. Colour changing cylindrical stars have to be covered with a wrap of gummed paper tape, one end primed and the sides and other end covered with paper tape. However stars burning from one end burn slowly and may fall too far so testing is required.

[Zumber]

49 minutes ago, Arthur said:

Given a star plate, you could put one colour in the holes, press lightly, then put a second colour on top and press correctly hard. Colour changing cylindrical stars have to be covered with a wrap of gummed paper tape, one end primed and the sides and other end covered with paper tape. However stars burning from one end burn slowly and may fall too far so testing is required.

Yeah but I think he is trying to roll stars and not looking for colour changing stars.

 

[Arthur]

The original poster said "he can't layer effects in a star plate" I've offered a way to do this.

[Zumber]

Yeah yeah....thats right.

[Soloserly]

I've rolled stars over pre-soaked amaranth, quinoa, mustard seeds, etc. and they all worked but now I agree with the above posters that it's usually better just to spritz the dry mix and tumble to get cores started.  A seed starter usually isn't really necessary.