JFeve81 Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 I have a 3/4" crossette pump from Wolter. I've successfully hand rammed charcoal streamer stars with it but am wondering if it's possible to hand ram a color comp. Specifically a red comp. I've read several pages of search results on here as well as passfire and everybody uses presses. What I'm wanting to end up with is a charcoal streamer star breaking into a red cross.
AirCowPeacock Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 I'm not entirely sure, I have never made a crossette, but arn't you going to have difficulty getting it to change colors. Colorchanging stars are normally rolled.
nater Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 I have lightly rammed a red MgAl comp with gloves and eye protection. However an arbor press makes pressing comets like that easier, quicker, and more consistent than using a mallet. I have not seen a hobbiest make color changing crossettes, but I have seen them in Chinese product. We use a high shot count cake with green to purple crossettes on almost every show. I like to open with front of them. It is a really neat surprise to have the crossettes break and change Colorado at the same time. Good luck getting the timing down.
dagabu Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 (edited) The good news is that color changing crossettes are pretty easy to make. First, use your Mg/Al red comp, its best to press them but using the process I use, you will have OK results (perhaps not perfect) every time. With a press, the crossettes are just about perfect due to consistent pressures. First, you need to measure your crossette tooling to find out what your pin to flat distance is, lets say it is 1" exactly. Tip your crossette tooling over so it is sitting on the base with the pin facing up, put the sleeve on it so the stop pin is sitting the sleeve, not in the slot. Add enough comp to fill the sleeve so that the comp covers the pin. -Warning- You can ruin your tooling if you mess this up. Use a wood dowel the same size as the tooling and drill a small hole in the center of the dowel just larger than the pin and a few times deeper. Use this dowel to press the comp down by hand, add more comp if necessary to completely cover the pin. Carefully, ram the dowel so that the pin is exposed, add more comp if necessary and ram so that 1/2 of the pin is showing. Dont pound with any real force, you are not trying to get a perfect compaction on the red, just enough to hold together. Now, grab the pump, plunge it into your streamer comp like normal, ram and trim as usual. If you do it right, the pin will only penetrate the streamer comp and the shot will only be in the red comp so that the two effects are separate and unexpected. What could go wrong? Its very hard to marry two comps this way, one dries faster than the other, one cracks, separates etc. Dry them slowly, paste wrap them before they are dry to the core but hard enough to handle safely. Use enough binder to get a good bond. Try a few and see what you get, ours are 39J tails with Tru-Red crossette base. I had to add another 2% Dextrine to get them to bond properly and think there may be some merit to using CMC instead. -dag Edited November 26, 2012 by dagabu
JFeve81 Posted November 26, 2012 Author Posted November 26, 2012 Good luck getting the timing down. I'm not too worried about the timing right now. I was just going to eventually make a cake with them and thought it would be nice to have several different styles of crossettes instead of them all being alike.
JFeve81 Posted November 26, 2012 Author Posted November 26, 2012 (edited) The good news is that color changing crossettes are pretty easy to make. First, use you Mg/Al red comp, its best to press them but using the process I use, you will have OK results (perhaps not perfect) every time. With a press, the crossettes are just about perfect due to consistent pressures. First, you need to measure your crossette tooling to find out what your pin to flat distance is, lets say it is 1" exactly. Tip your crossette tooling over so it is sitting on the base with the pin facing up, put the sleeve on it so the stop pin is sitting the sleeve, not in the slot. Add enough comp to fill the sleeve so that the comp covers the pin. -Warning- You can ruin your tooling if you mess this up. Use a wood dowel the same size as the tooling and drill a small hole in the center of the dowel just larger than the pin and a few times deeper. Use this dowel to press the comp down by hand, add more comp if necessary to completely cover the pin. Carefully, ram the dowel so that the pin is exposed, add more comp if necessary and ram so that 1/2 of the pin is showing. Dont pound with any real force, you are not trying to get a perfect compaction on the red, just enough to hold together. Now, grab the pump, plunge it into your streamer comp like normal, ram and trim as usual. If you do it right, the pin will only penetrate the streamer comp and the shot will only be in the red comp so that the two effects are separate and unexpected. What could go wrong? Its very hard to marry two comps this way, one dries faster than the other, one cracks, separates etc. Dry them slowly, paste wrap them before they are dry to the core but hard enough to handle safely. Use enough binder to get a good bond. Try a few and see what you get, ours are 39J tails with Tru-Red crossette base. I had to add another 2% Dextrine to get them to bond properly and think there may be some merit to using CMC instead. -dag Thanks for all that. I was thinking of doing it a bit differently. I was just going to ram a crossette like normal except shave it off at the pin. I've found that if the TOP of the stop pin is even with the top of the sleeve then that puts the pin in the perfect spot to shave the crossette. I guess I'll carefully try them both out and see which way I like better and which I feel more comfortable with. Edited November 26, 2012 by JFeve81
Mumbles Posted November 26, 2012 Posted November 26, 2012 I played around with these a little bit. Calipyro made me some custom tooling to do this actually, which I'll use in the future. I used a method like you described before, but it was kind of a pain. I had a piece of PVC with a groove cut into it that I used to accurately (sort of) get the plunger to the correct height for trimming. I had it set up to leave just a little bit of composition beyond the pin, which I would break out later. I then just pumped kind of a squat comet, which I glued on later after both halves were dry. I never got great timing on these things. Well, I never got great timing on crossettes period. I think part of the problem was that I used too much BP/NC glue to secure them together. I think some would occasionally seep into the pin area and mess with the timing. If you go this route, I'd suggest just a few light dabs to tack it together, and let the pasting secure everything. The tooling Cali made me is for round shots, so there is no pin, so I don't expect this to be a problem anymore. Besides color changing, I really enjoy charcoal tail to glitter breaking crossettes. They were just very appealing to me. I never got a chance to fire a shell full of them.
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