First small canister shell

[dagabu]

Peaches and Cream is made from 4/4, 100% cotton yarn, consisting of 4 soft twisted strands, 690 yds in length (about 2000 feet). Any 4/4 all cotton yarn will do, its all the same and the dye does not matter at all, get whatever color you can find. The reason I use all white is because you can see if the BP is whetted completely into the fibers.

 

This yarn is very airy and takes up a lot of BP slurry. It makes great single strand black match but I will say that after pulling several thousand yards of it myself over the past decade, I would not go without the addition of CMC unless it was never going to be bent. The CMC allows for a non-cracking BP coating (as long as it's not too thick) and even if tied in a loose knot, it will not cause a break in the fire chain. Inside a leader tube, I doubt it would matter much as the flame front propagates down the tube a a high rate of speed.

 

I am changing to a five strand black match now so I can pull flat match or a single round BM. Being kind of a string whore, I have lots of different string to choose from and I will check back from time to time with the results from each kind.

[Wiley]

Dag, that's interesting on the point about bending it. That method I posted above came from a fellow over on Fireworking, and the dusted coating really works wonders. I've tried bending a single strand many, many times in many places, then lighting it on the ground. It has always passed fire. In a pipe, that's even more guaranteed. I've also bent quite a bit of it around spolettes in these super salamis I've been working on. A bit of powder does flake off right at the joint where it is bent, but the rest retains its coating very well. It sure holds up better than the gray perc stuff for this process.

[dagabu]

I believe that the hank and knead in Italian in methodology, I always get knots in it so I gave up on doing it that way many years ago. Absolutely! Dusting is a must for good flame propagation in the pipe. I usually just spray the frame full of match with water and dust the strands and let it dry, pick up the drop cloth under the frame and put the extras back in the container I got it from.

 

Screened green powder is recommended by Swisher, mine is usually milled nut to each his own.

 

Tom Schroeder mentioned Argo Starch instead. I'm going to give that a try too.

[PhoenixRising]

I came into this thread with intentions of just showing off my little success and came out learning a heck of a lot more than I thought I would. Thanks Dag and Wiley.

 

So that I don't completely cloud this thread with cannon fodder, I'm going to select a few pics from the 80 that I took to show some construction. (I take doubles and triples of every shot to make sure one is in focus...... kind of like sending up multiple shells hoping you get the right orientation on break)

 

 

Just to recap, these were pics from the 2nd canister with all white stars. I will likely refine this process later on and try to do a tutorial. A total of 13 grams of granulated BP and 6 grams of booster were used. I will likely cut down the amount of booster a bit for next one as it's a little bit strong IMO.