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Posted

Hi all,

 

I was planning to make a sweet cake, 40 mortars 1"-and-a-bit ID multi effect. I used to pinch 2 holes in each tube connecting them with small seperate pieces of fast burning visco (about 1"/sec). I guess that's pretty standard, but if anybody uses some effective alternative, please do speak :)

 

Anyway, that works just fine. But here's the deal: I want to create some sort of finale effect shooting 2 series of 5 in fan shape. I tried fusing tubes with very short pieces of visco connecting them to a papertape leader fuse. This did not result in a clean simultaneous shot. Besides, it was a painsteaking job to connect all to the leader.

 

So does anyone have some idea to fix this problem considering I do not have access to fancy pyro supply stores as I live in Holland and those bloody Americans refuse to ship overseas ;) I would be most grateful.

 

PS Not shure if this deserves a new topic, I did perform a search but didn't find.

 

Ave, Ignes

Posted
Anyway, that works just fine. But here's the deal: I want to create some sort of finale effect shooting 2 series of 5 in fan shape. I tried fusing tubes with very short pieces of visco connecting them to a papertape leader fuse. This did not result in a clean simultaneous shot. Besides, it was a painsteaking job to connect all to the leader.

 

So does anyone have some idea to fix this problem considering I do not have access to fancy pyro supply stores as I live in Holland and those bloody Americans refuse to ship overseas ;) I would be most grateful.

I would try running a thin brass tube through the bottom of the 5 fanned tubes, with blackmatch in the tube, and holes drilled to ignite each mortar, maybe a short stick of BM in the holes.

Posted

The commercial items have a piece of quickmatch running across all the tubes that need firing, and each tube is "connected" to the quickmatch with a piece of blackmatch. From what I could tell by disecting a fired cake, the quickmathc contains 2 or 3 strands of blackmatch, and the connecting of the tubes is done by first sticking the quickmatch to the tubes and then piercing both the tubes and the qm at once followed by the insertion of the bm and after that a piece of paper tape is applied to the "junction" in order to secure the bm. I tried this method myself and it really worked, however, it didn't work as well with 1-stranded qm (a bit of delay between the tubes).

Hope this is useful!

Posted
the connecting of the tubes is done by first sticking the quickmatch to the tubes and then piercing both the tubes and the qm at once followed by the insertion of the bm and after that a piece of paper tape is applied to the "junction" in order to secure the bm.

That is one brilliant idea! First applying the quickmatch and just drilling holes trough both the qm and the tubes... that will really speed up the process. I will most certainly try this. Thanks for the replies.

 

EDIT: It seems that the answer was on my pc already as I just found a video which shows the process in commercial items. Must come from a pyroforum, don't know which one, but credits to the OP.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gv0rE-wqhY

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

Well, this is a video i got from the net showing how a firework factory fuses cakes, how thy make cakes, mortars allot of different things.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=72...earch&plindex=8

 

 

its 40 minutes long showing everything :D

Posted
Very interesting! Amazing to see that it's all done by hand for the greater part, and the rest of it by simple but effective technology. Think of it... what do you pay for a 10k celebration cracker? €8? that includes shipping from China and gain for middlemen. This goes a bit off topic ;)
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