Making powdred wax

[whitefox77]

Since the word "wax" is too short to search on, I wasn't sure if this topic has come up before. If so, I apologize.

 

I am using powdered wax in making smoke devices. I have plenty of wax around (another hobby is making candles). However, I'm having a hard time creating powdered wax. I've been crashing it in a mortar and pestle, but it's impossible to get it very fine that way as once you start getting a fine enough powder it just presses together again. I just got/built a cheap mill out of a rock-tumbler from Walmart, and some chrome (I'm just milling KNO3, not black powder) ball-bearings from a surplus store, but I don't think it will do much better than the mortar and pestle. Any idea's on how to get fine powdered wax?

[Mumbles]

Any sort of mechanical grinding won't work. It's too liquid to work. I believe something along the lines of a cheese grater is said to work fairly well. Alternatively, you could dissolve the wax in hot solvent such as Naphtha or mineral spirits, or something similar, and just add the liquid to your smoke composition. Spread it out and allow it to try like one would with whistle mix.

[oskarchem]

Try Freezing it in a freezer and then hitting it.

 

Or freez it with some kind of compressed gaz like Butane/propane... You know When a gaz is decompressed the temperature is very low.

[jacob]

The ball mill idea probably won't work, you'll just end up coating it in wax. try a meat grinder, thats what i use and it turns out about pea size and smaller.

[moonshot]

I think combining oskarchems idea of freezing the wax to make it hard and mumbles idea of using a fine cheese grater would work. Try it out and see what happens. I wouldn't ball mill it because once it warms up in the mill it will just turn into a big lump. You might try freezing it and chopping it up in one of those cheap electric coffee grinders.

[mormanman]

To save work I would just toss it in a blender. Your wife/girl friend/mom might get mad though.

[Mumbles]

And thus why it is a good idea to get a dedicated pyro blender.

 

Anyway, I've never tried to crush wax, but I wouldn't imagine it would become significantly hard enough to crush just at freezer temperatures. I've been wrong before though.

[DeAdFX]

Avoid using a blender to grind wax... I have tried this before with mixed results. If you do a continous grind the wax will begin to melt (from the heat of the motor) and form a gigantic wax plug. The blades will have a very difficult time grinding. If the contacts between the motor and the blender cup are made of plastic they will break and you will have wasted $20-50.

[oskarchem]

Yeah I'm with you on that DeAdFX Or if the contacts are made of metal the motor will over heat and maybe (small chanse though) take fire... So try freeznig it with lN2 maybe?

[Sylar]

It's not the powdering proces that is difficult here, it's keeping it powdered.

Which is really not possible if your room temperature happens to be higher then freezing temperatures.

 

So melt the stuff and mix hot or dissolve and let solvent evaporate.

[NightHawkInLight]

Well recently I made a naphthalene charge by adding several grams of charcoal to the naph to keep it from clumping (this had prevented fireballs from working very well in the past) The charcoal made it nice and fluffy and worked as a great anti clumping agent. It may work the same with hard wax if you don't mind a bit of charcoal in your comps.

[OneEyeCharlie]

As an alternative, you could try to scrounge up some of the older, bar shuffleboard wax. They were tiny, spherical wax beads. I know it's not powder, but it comes fairly close, and it doesn't clump.

 

The newer stuff is silicone, but I think the older stuff is still available.

[whitefox77]

The cheese grater worked well, but still produces a very large partial size. I think the only way to get this to work perfect is to add the wax melted.

[oskarchem]

Honestly put a peice in a freezer, it could work...

[asilentbob]

If we are talking about wax for smoke bombs... you don't necessarily want it too fine.

 

It has 2 main jobs that i can think of:

1. Reduce the temp of the burning composition through evaporative cooling.

2. Produce oddles of atomized airfloat wax particles.

 

If the wax is really fine particles already in the mix chances are that it will burn up instead of melting and boiling off. Meaning less smoke. AND probably higher temperatures because the evaporative cooling is not effective when the wax itself is burning before escaping the heat and flame of the composition inside the choke. Hydrocarbons have pretty damn good heats of combustion.

 

Paraffin wax has about 9.9 Kcal/g... Compare this with:

Al about 7.4 kcal/g

Mg about 5.9 kcal/g

Sucrose/lactose about 3.9 kcal/g

 

I'm thinking if you have enough fine wax it will just turn into a somewhat over glorified violent tiki torch. So there is defiantly going to be an optimum wax particle size and shape for smoke production. Would be cool if someone could run a whole bunch of experiments to determine it, however since no 2 people's smoke mix is the same in regards to proportions, particle sizes, particle shapes, and integration... AND not all paraffin wax is created equal. The results wouldn't necessarily be conclusive for anyone other than that particular person using the exact same reagent batches, integration, etc.

 

 

Its kinda like aluminum size in stars... if your using dark very fine Al flake it will all get used up more or less right next to the star before it can really escape the heat and all to give those nice long sparks. Where-as with for instance -200mesh spherical it can survive to burn up in the air farther away from the stars due to the lowered surface area.

 

Another similar situation is with standard Fe2O3/Al thermites. When your using like -325mesh flake Al your not going to get a nice chunk of Fe because all the Al is going to get oxidized very quickly and either reduce the iron oxide to elemental iron that will also oxidize quickly burning in the air, or the Al itself will burn up in the air before even reacting... Where-as with both chemicals around 100mesh less of each gets oxidized excessively in the air and you will be more likely to get a nice white hot quickly solidifying puddle of Fe.

 

You might be able to get relativly fine mesh wax by grating it through a window screen. If your going to test this... Don't use one of your good screens. I like the idea of shuttlecock-put-whatever it is wax, though personally I wouldn't use it in smoke mix, but perhaps some kind of "flaming shit" type star for those of you that are familiar with the effect. I'd probably buy a container of it if i ever came accross it.

 

So don't go too fine if your trying to optimize smoke.

 

Edit: Kcal/g 's aside from paraffin wax taken from "The Pyrotechnic Workshop Reference" as linked to in my signature. Seriously this thing is helpful, use it.

[psyco_1322]

somewhat over glorified violent tiki torch.

ROFL! Not sure what it is but thats just funny.

[Mumbles]

I was thinking about this actually. They sell balled wax for making candles. Maybe 30 mesh or so. It looks like it's probably spray atomized. One of my lady friends made a few for me. A layer of molten wax is poured over the top, and the balls of wax melt as you burn it. They look rather cool actually. If some of this could be sourced, it may be a reasonably good mesh for wax. Probably significantly finder than you'd be able to get with a grater or what not.

 

I also don't think putting wax in the freezer would be enough to make it brittle.

 

Another thing to try is stearin. Someone out there has to have some for blue star aspirations.

[whitefox77]

The "cheese grater" I used had two sizes of whole, the large ones are the ones I always use for cheese. I used the small ones (about 2mm diameter). It produced wax partials were from 600 to 1200 micron across. I just tried it in a smoke device yesterday, and was less than thrilled with it. I got less smoke, a VERY unsteady burn rate (over all it burned almost twice as long as before), and a much hotter smoke device. Using the larger flaky wax that comes out of the mortar & pestle worked a lot better, even if it is harder to make a uniform mix.

 

I think the problem was two fold. First , as asilentbob said, I think that the smaller partials were burning instead of boiling.

 

Second, the grated wax was a lot less dense than the crushed wax. I noticed as I was measuring that it seemed like I was using a lot more wax, even though the weight was the same, so I compared the two. The same mass of grated wax displaced 3 times as much water when submerged. The less dense partials changed the over all density of the mix, and created a "by-volume" imbalance between the wax and other chemicals. There were simply too many wax partials for the amount of other chemicals.

 

I think I'm going to try crushing the wax in the mortar & pestle out side. If I do it at night after getting home from work, it'll only be a few degrees above 0°F. Hopefully that will give me both a smaller partial size, and a denser wax. Of course if this works, I'm going to have to crush a years worth of wax between now and March...

[mormanman]

And thus why it is a good idea to get a dedicated pyro blender.

 

Anyway, I've never tried to crush wax, but I wouldn't imagine it would become significantly hard enough to crush just at freezer temperatures. I've been wrong before though.

Vitamix, unsure of the spelling but it will grind beef bones to powder in 10 seconds or less but they're like $120.

[Mumbles]

Beef bones are also not nearly as soft or maleable as wax though.

[whitefox77]

So far the very best way I've found is to first freeze the wax, then break up and crush the wax with a mortar and pestle while keeping it in sub freezing temperatures. With patients, I can get the graduals down to about twice the size as granular sugar.

 

Right now this process is pretty easy as it hasn't been above freezing at night here in a couple months. However, come spring it's going to be much harder to grind my wax.

 

Two notes:

-Simply grinding it up into small bits doesn't produce as good a wax as crushing it up with a mortar and pestle. Some simple submersion tests show that the crushed wax is considerably more dense than ground wax. The denser wax tends to mix with the other chemicals much more easily.

 

-Although it is easier to mix this crushed wax with powdered chemicals than other methods I used, the wax will still tend to separate and settle on top of the other chemicals. The best way for mixing this I've found is to put your mix in to a cylindrical container, filling the container only about 1/2 full. Then turn the container end over end slowly to mix. This produces a very uniform mix.

[hst45]

This is just a wild-assed guess, but how about trying to MAKE the atomized wax Mumbles describes? In a double boiler, melt wax. Insert a thin, hot tube into the wax, and blow compressed air past the top end of the tube, acting as a venturi and drawing the liquid wax up into the air stream. Spray the airstream over a large, cold water surface, and the wax beads *should* then harden into smallish pellets. You'd probably have to rake the pellets off in small batches or the newly forming ones would stick to those already hardened.

 

Venturi size would undoubtedly be a trial and error proposition.

[Frozentech]

You know... candle makers solved this long ago. Granulated paraffin wax, aka "parasand" is pretty cheap.

[whitefox77]

Actually I've bought atomized (the packages call it "crystal") wax. It is also not very dense at all. Normally solid wax will sink in melted wax, but crystal wax floats on melted wax. The process of atomizing it must trap a lot of air in it. The grain size is actually just a bit bigger than what I can make by keeping it frozen.

 

The good thing about it is that when it's used to make candles, crystal was is very pretty, and will melt much more quickly than solid wax. But this isn't a forum on making candles...

[KinneticEnergy]

Take a dremel or high speed/power drill, and put a cylindrical sanding bit in it. Then put your wax in a container, a plastic trash bag or a box should work. Then turn the tool on high and sand it down. Worked for me.