Coloured flashes using granulated star comp

[Twignberry]

Hi,

 

Has anyone tried granulating a coloured star comp and adding it as a comet heading in a lightly confined casing?

 

The effect I'm imagining is a nice .75"-1" glitter comet tail with a series of random coloured flashes without noise as each comet burns out.

[GMetcalf]

I can imagine a few wraps of Kraft around a comet to create a small recess at one end, then filling this with microstars and pleating it over and gluing it (not dissimilar from lift wrap) might achieve what you're after. Maybe adding some finely granulated Black Powder might improve ignition of the stars and cause them to puff out a bit more rather than just fall out of the casing, horsetail style, like I imagine they would.

 

Never tried it though so it's just my guess as to how to achieve it! If you select your coloured star composition carefully you could probably make microstars you could embed within a matrix to make a comet which gives off coloured 'sparks'. I've seen this done with strobe microstars to produce 'coloured glitter' a bunch of times so maybe the non-strobe form is also possible...

[pyrokid]

I've played with this effect a few times, and what I've found is that the small pieces of color star don't ignite fast enough to give the impression of flashes.

 

GMetcalf, could you please give some details about these matrix comets? I've tried and failed to make this effect.

 

I have some small red stars coated in glusatz waiting to be put into comets, but I still have doubts. I had a hard time trying to roll the glusatz too.

[Rocketier]

Cover the small microstars with some "dark relay" composition. It will give just the delay to escape the comet firetail before igniting.

 

Dark relay

Potassium nitrate 75

Airfloat charcoal 8

KClO4 7

Red Gum 2

Antimony Trisulfide 3

Edited June 9, 2015 by Rocketier