Quickmatch info

[nesc39]

So I'm new to this hobby and I've been doing some reading on making quickmatch. As far as I understand its 3-5 pieces of blackmatch inside of a Kraft paper pipe. I know guys make their own paper pipe but I found on a site " paper leader pipe" - with a water resistant interior coating.....#1 Is this the correct product that I would use to make quickmatch? #2 when making the blackmatch is it better to have more plys in your cotton string. i have seen 5,8,16 and anything in between, whats best more or less plys. #3 if making a shell, one end of quickmatch goes into the lift cup and the other end just connects to visco right? Thanks in advance guys, feel free to add anything u like.

[Sinken]

#1: Well, you can pretty much use anything you want, as long as there's not too much room. Seems kinda pricey though

#2: I don't think that's very important, but it may help the BP stick. I've managed to mage blackmatch with 3(?)

#3: Yes, and if you really care about safety, you put the other end of the visco on a electrical igniter of some sort, and do the whole thing remotely.

[dan999ification]

I use 1mm cotton 3ply, 3 strands in 1/4" pipes and 5 strands in 3/8" pipes.

I'd say roll your own with two turns of Kraft it's dead easy, once you supply runs out or you can't afford like me you'll have to roll em anyway, may aswell start now

I'm not paying £1 per mtr for qm when mine costs pence.

Its all preference of course, you'll find yours.

 

Dan.

[nesc39]

ya they are pretty tight i was wondering the best way to open them to slide in the match. I was thinking a small dowel to open it and then slide the match behind it. That would work for a say 36" long length but what would you do it you wanted to make like 10' lengths?

[dan999ification]

Make a machine or just tape/paste shorter lengths together.

I only use it for leaders and sometimes

Chaining shells so don't really need long lengths.

 

Dan.

[AirCowPeacock]

Good stiff black match will slide effortlessly into a nicely rolled tube.

[dan999ification]

Roll me a ten foot tube and slide my bm in

18" is all I can manage before the match suffer plus my brass rod id only 20" ,but then I do like it tight like machine made qm. I find the tighter you can get it the more abuse it can withstand, I can bend and even Roll mine and its still good.

 

 

Dan.

[Peret]

Quick and cheap quickmatch method:

 

Cut a strip of paper 1.5 inches wide and as long as you like. Fold it in thirds longways, then flatten it out. Lay a couple of strands of black match along it, fold one side over the match, run a glue stick down the other flap then fold it over and rub down to make a tube. I used to make all my shell leaders this way.

[psyco_1322]

That's a great sounding method for some quick and dirty match.

 

The best way to roll pipe is with a thin strip, at an angle around a rod. You don't need to worry about trying to roll the entire length at once, and as long as you keep adding stripes of paper, you keep making continuous pipe.

 

When I used to make my own QM, I had an old car antenna that had the ends cut off (any piece of thin metal rod should work), tape the ends of the BM to the rod, and let it fall through the pipe, pulling the BM through it. It sure beats trying to feed them through the pipe, and doesn't matter if the match is stiff or limp...it still gets in

[Oinikis]

i use the same method Peret described, exept with thinner strip. i use only 2 strands of blackmatch, no issues. is there is and airgap, it will always be a quickmatch.

[nesc39]

What is everyone's favorite comp for making their blackmatch? What binder is best? Red gum is used for powder but I haven't seen anyone using it on their match, how come?

[Sinken]

I guess it's because dextrin is cheaper, and you don't need the extra power Red gum gives you.

[nater]

Most people make their black powder with dextrin as the binder. For black match, dextrin and CMC are common, I have even heard of people using laundry starch to get stiff match.

 

Back the the OP, question #3.

 

One end of the QM leader is inserted into the lift cup with a few inches of piping removed so the strands of BM are exposed. Stick all of the exposed BM into the lift to give a good amount of fire. If you have a bottom fused shell, you can tie some of the BM from the leader to the already crossmatched time fuse before adding lift.

 

As for the other end. If you are handlighting, you can stick a piece of visco into the piping or you can expose a length of BM to give you time to walk away from the rack. If you are using an ematch, just stick the shrouded match head into the end of the leader and secure with a half hitch knot. Make sure to use a strain relief like a hole drilled in the top of the mortar or a screw in the rack to tie off the ematch. This way the rising shell won't rip the ematch leads out of your rail damaging the electronics.

[nesc39]

I was just reading page 198 of shimzu's FAST and he recommended using gum Arabic as the binder with hot water. This was written 30+ years ago and I know that red gum has since replaced most gum Arabic so I fig I would try red gum. He didn't even mention dextrin, maybe it wasn't being used at that time? Red gum seems like it would be a better choice since it is dissolved in alcohol the match would dry much faster. The other thing worth noting is that he suggests boiling string in a potassium nitrate solution and drying before making the match because it helps to keep the match lit when the match is creased and powder has flaked off.

[Mumbles]

Gum arabic and red gum are two very different things. If red gum has replaced anything, it's shellac. Faster isn't always better. Even with water, blackmatch can be dry within a few hours to overnight.

 

If you look around there is some good information here on producing blackmatch and quickmatch. I'd suggest starting here:

http://www.amateurpyro.com/forums/topic/7665-learning-to-make-blackmatch-the-right-way/

[nesc39]

Thanks

[nesc39]

A close friend has attempted at making blackmatch, here are his findings.

Updates : (1) I have now learned dextrin had been used in firework production for at least 80 years.

(2) He made red gum/alcohol black match and found it to be slightly less stiff than his 5% dextrin match. Also it burned SLOWER, however this may have been due to the fact that he did not untwist/re-twist the string when using red gum formula like he did with the dextrin. With both formulas he contained them in a bowl and mashed the slurry into the string until it was thoroughly covered.

(3) At first thought the stiffer the match the better but he is now just concentrating on reliablility in terms of being able to bend and fold the match while still keeping a fire.

(4) 12ply cotton string was used in all cases

(5) a square frame 3' across with 20 finish nails along the top and 20 along the bottom were used to make a rack to dry it, vision piano strings inside of a piano, it looks like that. It worked but it is much to hard to wrap the string around each nail. The nails were 3/4" apart which ended up causing the match to wanna stick to each other because its to close. The frame is going to be changed so that it resembles the same one Ned Gorski designed and uses in his article "tiger shells in 2.5 days" on skylighter.com

(6) At first a small container was used as a machine.( same basic idea as u see in most pyro sites) It was drilled on opposite sides of another and the end of a caulking tube was glued as a die on the exit to keep all the string uniform. It was abandoned until further notice because the string wasn't being covered well enough and it kept getting stuck when the string would twist(more on this in a moment).

(7) DO NOT CUT THE STRING OFF THE ROLL!!! The string just twists itself into a mess of knots and it sucks. Next time a dowel will hold the string roll so it can spin freely.

(8) the match is much smoother using the caulking tube tip but it didn't change the burn

(9) if the match was creased in both cases the fire would stop and glow for a few seconds and relight. The next batch he is going to try soaking the string in saturated potassium nitrate water solution and use dextrin composition. It is supposed to help with keeping the match lit .

(10) when used 2 at a time in a paper pipe it burned fast and reliable.

 

When making quick match for a shell leader can someone confirm if this is the proper way? You slide a few lengths of black match into a paper tube, the match should be a few inches longer than the paper and bare into the lift cup. Should the paper leader be tight as possible around the match or slightly loose? Do you seal the paper leader tube tight around where the visco enters the leader and at the bottom where the bare match exits the paper tube? In his test my buddy just squeezed the tube tight and wrapped a small piece of masking tape around it. Is that nescessary?

 

[pyrojig]

 

When making quick match for a shell leader can someone confirm if this is the proper way? You slide a few lengths of black match into a paper tube, the match should be a few inches longer than the paper and bare into the lift cup. Should the paper leader be tight as possible around the match or slightly loose? Do you seal the paper leader tube tight around where the visco enters the leader and at the bottom where the bare match exits the paper tube? In his test my buddy just squeezed the tube tight and wrapped a small piece of masking tape around it. Is that nescessary?

 

There really is no wrong way to do this, but there are some ways to make it perform better. I find that the best performing Q match is done by putting 2-4 single pieces of BM in a tube till it is not snug but not alot of airgap either. To large of tube will not give energetic enough match, but too tight and loading is a bare. I leave the BM longer than the tube for the powder cup, and flush cut on top with a visco fuse hot glued in to seal the pipe(only so no sparks can prematurely ignite the QMatch. My match is very fast this way. Some prefer to not use visco, and just leave 4-6" of bare match out on the top side( like commercial Shells ) .

[ollie1016]

Anyone know if a smaller air space around the black match in the quick match will make it faster or slower?

[Mumbles]

If you're worried about speed of your quickmatch, you're doing it wrong.

[nesc39]

Thanks pyrojig

UPDATE: The string soaked in nitrate solution before coating in slurry was 200% better. The finished match was bent, twisted folded way more than it would ever in a real life situation and it stays lit every time.

[mike_au]

I can understand why nitrate soaked string might be beneficial for blackmatch, but it shouldn't really be necessary for quickmatch. Even with relatively poor BP and one end of the tube completely open you should be producing enough hot gasses to jump over a gap of a few cm.

[nesc39]

Mike your totally right, this is all new to me and I used the wrong term. Even with my worst black match I was able to make decent( for me) quick match. I may have asked this earlier but I have a hard time looking for previous posts cause I use a phone. How tight should the paper wrap around the match? Like a cigarette? or loose so it can wiggle around? Does either affect speed? I actually tried the masking tape method of quick match and the first piece I made was the best of all previous attempts of any kind in terms of speed. My second piece quit halfway through because i squeezed it to tight due to inconsistent bp grain size.

[Mumbles]

You want to keep it a little bit loose to maintain flexibility. If the tube is too tight, it will split if you try to bend it. The biggest thing you can do to increase speed and reliability is to use more than one stick of black match. Anything more than that is just adding redundancy as the speed is already so fast that you'll never notice any increases. It's also close to impossible to choke off multistrand quickmatch. When I was making my own quickmatch, I would use about as much BM as would easily slide into the tube. I think this was 3 pieces of roughly 1/8" thick match. I pre-rolled the tubes and filled them later. You can do mindless stuff like rolling tubes inside while watching TV or something.

 

If you want to take a cue from commercial quickmatch, most of it is flat. It does expand upon burning or if you need to slide something inside though. There are a bunch of styles, but they normally have 3 to 5 strands of blackmatch inside. Sometimes they're separate strands, sometimes they're kind of stuck together (loaded wet), and sometimes they're actually a ribbon. For what it's worth, the best quality stuff I've ever used was always 5 totally individual strands. Each strand was about 1/16" in diameter, so I'd estimate that the match was about 3/8" to 7/16" wide including the paper and everything. This corresponds with a tube slightly over 1/4" in diameter, which is about right. So they use 5 thinner strands, where I was using 3 thicker strands in the same sized tube.

 

Too tight is definitely an issue, but this is pretty much never a problem if you roll your own tubes. If you try to wrap something around the match to make QM, you can definitely choke it off, even if using multiple strands.

[taiwanluthiers]

I've made my own quickmatch pipe using gummed tape... I fold the gum tape into 3 sections (lengthwise) and tuck the bm in it, then wet one section and close it off. It won't work so well for longer runs but it makes pretty good pipes for what I'm using it for. I then tape visco into the open end once the shell is leadered.

 

One thing I read from passfire for making bm is bunch the strings up and knead it in the bp slurry. This forces the slurry between the string plys and makes for a quality match. However so far I have only found 3 ply strings but it still works ok.