Lesson learned, blind stars...

[braddsn]

In hopes that this will help someone who is also in the beginning stages of building aerial shells... I have been testing several shells in the last few days, and I shot 4 shells last night, 2 with flash powder in the break charge, and 2 without. All 4 shells were identical, 4 inchers.. The 2 with flash (4 grams in each shell) blew almost completely blind.. maybe 5 or 6 stars were lit. They looked bad... I then shot the 2 with no flash.. and WOOOOAHHHH... beautiful, perfectly symmetrical, super-bright green and blue stars. I had always been under the impression that a little flash will make a nice hard break. My thought now is that it really depends on how powerful your bp is. If you have a relatively slow bp, then a shell may benefit from a little flash.. So in a nutshell, for you guys that are building your first shells, try it first with no flash. cheers!

[Ubehage]

Flash usually explodes so violent, that it will blow out everything else. I have also learned that the hard way

[Nessalco]

I've only made a few hundred 3" and 4" shells. I've never put flash booster in any of them, and would describe my breaks as 'adequate'. I'm not all that fond of the super hard breaks anyway. I work on making good BP, and adequately containment when I build the shell.

 

With that being said - isn't 4 grams of flash a lot in a 4" shell? I'm assuming these are ball shells.

 

Kevin

[pyroMIKE]

Heat is the key in getting a harder break.If you have slow BP, use a little slow flash..This aids in getting the bp to heat up faster in turn making the bp burn faster for a harder break..Slow flash is a whole different animal compared to a perc based flash. Slow flash, whistle mix, is a much better booster to use than perc based flash because of the problems you have described.

[taiwanluthiers]

I also found this out too, flash seems to serve no purpose at all except for making the shell look terrible. I don't know how commercial shells manage to pack so much flash into it and not blow every stars blind. Commercial 3" shells must sound at least 20 decibels (which is significant) louder than my own shells without flash boost...

[Arthur]

Plastic ball shells tend to need a booster of flash or whistle, but in my limited experience paster paper ball shells don't need booster, BUT they do need lots of good pasting.

[pyroMIKE]

I have never blew stars blind using slow flash..Also in a 4 inch shell if you gonna use perc based flash I wouldnt use more than 1 gram.

[MrB]

Plastic ball shells tend to need a booster of flash or whistle, but in my limited experience paster paper ball shells don't need booster, BUT they do need lots of good pasting.

Meh... Plastic shells just needs to be pasted. I don't like em, so i never use em if i have any other options, but when building with / for others, sometimes your options are... limited. I know some people use plastic shells "as is" and don't paste them. or only just barely past em, and they need to boost them, a lot, but personally i find that the wrong way of doing things. And wrapping a plastic shell with fiberglass armed tape, isn't pasting in my world, it's something between "as is" and pasted. Not sure what, but an abomination, for sure. Who's doing the cleanup for these guys?

B!

[Arthur]

All the plastic shells I've ever seen were bare plastic (no pasting paper) hence my comment. I too dislike the debris from a plastic shell, too much evidence if you are playing under the radar and too much litter if you are operating professionally.

[eb11]

ok so any ideas on the composition

[enanthate]

Im building 4" shells with 16mm pumped stars, these are relatively large and after firing a couple yesterday I realized that it needs a little bit of flash to be symmetrical. Got little room for breakcharge. I recon 0.5g will do, as it doesnt take much at all to blow them blind.

 

http://youtu.be/42_BjQCgzjQ

[mkn]

Nice shell ! I like the tailing comet, I need to start using them.

Matt

[ExplosiveCoek]

Nice tail and hangtime, however it looks like your stars are getting destroyed during the break (not fully dry or good shape pumped stars?). Hence the cloud formation of streamer compo in the centre of the shell.

[enanthate]

Correct, EC. The dextrin that I used wasn't the best, it's taken care of now.

I find the break a bit "sloppy" if thats the right word, but it was windy and the stars are just a bit oversized I recon. Made myself a 10mm starplate today, looking forward to test the same comp in that.

The color stars were just there to fill the bottom or something, dont know why I put them in really..

 

Edit: The rising tail is 2 stars glued to the outside of the shell by the way. It lights for much longer than the stars, by some reason... Same batch, shape and size.

Gotta mention that the stars looked better in reality, they hang for 20 seconds or so (camera didn't record the glitter well). A beautiful aftereffect.

Edited November 1, 2014 by enanthate

[dynomike1]

I use plastic and the only place i shoot them is on my own place. I also only put 2 turns of masking tape around the seam with 2G of 73/30 in a 3" and 3G in a 4" and i have symmetrical breaks. I used to have trouble with stars blowing blind with plastic till i found out my seam was coming apart instead of breaking apart. Makes a big difference.