ST1DinOH Posted November 8, 2007 Posted November 8, 2007 anyone ever try making a re-loadable cake using HDPE? i'm thinking of making myself some reloadable boxes and drilling a small hole in the bottom of the HDPE guns going across the top of the plug. just wondering if this would cause any problems... 2 potential problems i can think of 1. drilling a small hole (1/4 or 3/16) straight through the middle of the gun just above the plug might somehow compromise the integrity of the HDPE gun, and after X ammount of uses the hole may enlarge and ruin my HDPE 2. gun jumping. due to the way i'll be fusing the cake/rack i'm concerned that if a tube jumps, it may damage, or even cut, the chain fuse. the idea here is i can drill a bypass hole in 9 tubes, fish some faast yellow visco through the "cake" along the bottom, then make 1.75 shells that use the corners of a plastic sandwich baggies for lift cups. this gives me a 3x3 re-loadable cake when i load my shells into the cake/rack the plastic baggie lift cups will be resting directly on top of the chain fuse which is directly on top of the plug inthe bottom of the gun. now assuming i make multiple cake/racks like this, and i use the same roll of fast yellow, and i ensure all the tubes are orientated inthe same manner... the cakes should all fire in near perfect unison without having to use zip ties to chain all the shell leaders together. the real idea here is to make a much larger version of this... a 36 shot box (6x6) with a removable top grid so after shooting i can dissasmble the cake and refuse it. in order to use this design the tubes won't be rock solid-ly (is that a word?) secured into the rack...so they could possibly jump around. but with a wood spacer between each gun the jumping of one gun shouldn't dislodge any of the others in the rack/cake. i feel this design is far superior to what i have now which is a 75 shot box full of 75 sdr-11's all smashed in next to each other in a 5x15 with the design i'm thinking of each tube will be seperated by the others by a wood spacer on the very top and on the very bottom. anyone have any thought on this?
qwezxc12 Posted November 9, 2007 Posted November 9, 2007 One of the ideas from Passfire's reloadable fan racks is to use steel brake line as a conduit for the fuse. Drill the holes through your tubes and route 1/8" or 3/16" brake line with passfire holes drilled through the tubing that line up with the center of each mortar. Epoxy the brake line in place and secure the tubes into whatever cake arrangement that suits your fancy. I don't think that you'd need to bother using lift cups or baggies...just thread your fast visco through the tubing, then dump loose powder into the mortar tubes. Drop your shells in, light and enjoy. I think you'd want to stick with visco...if you used blackmatch, the brake line would act as a quickmatch tube and your cake might fire all the mortar tubes simultaneously...bet it would be pretty cool, but you might stain your pants in front of your friends...
ST1DinOH Posted November 9, 2007 Author Posted November 9, 2007 One of the ideas from Passfire's reloadable fan racks is to use steel brake line as a conduit for the fuse. Drill the holes through your tubes and route 1/8" or 3/16" brake line with passfire holes drilled through the tubing that line up with the center of each mortar. Epoxy the brake line in place and secure the tubes into whatever cake arrangement that suits your fancy. I don't think that you'd need to bother using lift cups or baggies...just thread your fast visco through the tubing, then dump loose powder into the mortar tubes. Drop your shells in, light and enjoy. I think you'd want to stick with visco...if you used blackmatch, the brake line would act as a quickmatch tube and your cake might fire all the mortar tubes simultaneously...bet it would be pretty cool, but you might stain your pants in front of your friends... that was something i thought of, there's a few problems... first of all i wouldn't be able to re-fuse a larger cake (36 shot) without removing all the brake line tubes and secondly the brake line tubes would definatley cause a chain reaction by funneling the little jet of lift gasses into the next tube, passing fire to the lift, then passing fire to thenext tube and so on... all 36 tubes would go in about 1 second as soon as the first shell lifted. the way i figure it the fast yellow visco (3 seconds per foot) should burn in and out of the tubes and fire them off at the rate of about a shell per second. thats if i fuse it all in a chain. i could alter it anyway i want and run chains of black match in craft tubes (like mini QM) with little slits in them to pass fire to the lift of each shell. once the rack is built and the guns are drilled i can get creative, but before i go through the hassle i just wanted to bounce the idea off everyone and see what they think. almost forgot...in chatting with a pyro friend of mine he suggested i could use shims of cardboard to hold the tube in place to prevent the hopping and keep them turned the way i want. has anyone ever tried anything like this? and will repeated use damage my tubes due to that little jet of lift gasses exiting from each hole... or worse yet...could this cause low breaks?
hst45 Posted November 9, 2007 Posted November 9, 2007 I've done small cardboard versions of this with a hole cross-drilled just above the base plug and visco threaded through them and made them into rows of 3,4 or 5 tubes, and at the end I cross fuse these with quickmatch to pass fire back across the next row, and then tape 3,4 or 5 of these together into a cake. I don't know how much the HDPE would deteriorate, if at all, with repeated burnings of visco in the fuse holes though. Cardboard is good for up to half a dozen firings before the fuse holes expand too much.
ST1DinOH Posted November 9, 2007 Author Posted November 9, 2007 I've done small cardboard versions of this with a hole cross-drilled just above the base plug and visco threaded through them and made them into rows of 3,4 or 5 tubes, and at the end I cross fuse these with quickmatch to pass fire back across the next row, and then tape 3,4 or 5 of these together into a cake. I don't know how much the HDPE would deteriorate, if at all, with repeated burnings of visco in the fuse holes though. Cardboard is good for up to half a dozen firings before the fuse holes expand too much. a dozen uses out of cardboard...nice i'd assume HDPE would take more of a beating than that. just wanted to add that i wouldn't always use the racks/cakes this way, i could use then just as normal as well but if i had the time to make 72 1.75's for a finale i sure as hell would rather see some homemade salutes ending my show than a bunch of 1.4 shells.
FrankRizzo Posted November 10, 2007 Posted November 10, 2007 A much easier method is to buy pre-made racks from Noel over at Pyrogear.net. Use homemade QM leaders for all of your shells and run a length of visco along the top of the tubes, attaching each leader along the visco runner with foil tape. You can even pre-attach groups of shells to lengths of visco and keep them in your ready-box for easy reloading.
hst45 Posted November 10, 2007 Posted November 10, 2007 a dozen uses out of cardboard...niceActually, I said about half a dozen. They do get pretty ratty after about four firings, and I don't have any experience with HDPE, but I think you're right in that I bet they might be longer lived.
ST1DinOH Posted November 10, 2007 Author Posted November 10, 2007 A much easier method is to buy pre-made racks from Noel over at Pyrogear.net. Use homemade QM leaders for all of your shells and run a length of visco along the top of the tubes, attaching each leader along the visco runner with foil tape. You can even pre-attach groups of shells to lengths of visco and keep them in your ready-box for easy reloading.yeah i didn't want to tell noel i was about to butcher 120 15 inch sdr-11s then again he's probably all for it...worst case scenario i wind up buying more tubes from him. the whole goal here is to get my shells firing from multiple points in near perfect unison without the time and hassle of going through a few hundred zip ties, a few rolls of tape and tons of QM. if this method works all i'll need is a length of yellow visco long enough to snake through all the tubes. should be a huge time saver just using a fishing stringer. the whole goal here is once everything is all said n done i can drop my plastic baggie lift cupped shells into the guns and just e-match the end. i'm trying to get this all done by next 4th so i can have at least 2 36 shot boxes filled with crackle tailed 1.75 salutes that i can shoot under the 3's and 4's. 72 of them in about 10 seconds should look nice during the finale. can't do re-loads either...all our big shoots are done on a floating barge in the river. unless someone wants to swim out there it's all one time use. kinda a pain in the ass but you get a double canvas with the reflected light off the water http://www.pyrouniverse.com/gallery2/data/520/medium/fiesta_on_the_water.jpg it's so worth the hassel of floating everything and shooting wireless. basicly the racks will have a dual use...as a standard rack if i'm just tossing up some 1.4 shells, or as a reloadable cake if the mood so strikes me. ok time to stop talking about it and get it done. i should have the pics of the rack posted in the next few weeks... i gotta wind up cutting 80 of one pattern and 56 of another to give me 2 36 shot (6 x 6) boxes and 4 12 shot (2 x 6) racks. buying the wood this weekend i hope. Actually, I said about half a dozen. They do get pretty ratty after about four firings, and I don't have any experience with HDPE, but I think you're right in that I bet they might be longer lived. oops...my bad still i'm sure as you say 6 uses out of cardboard translates into tons of uses from HDPE. thanks again.
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