Alcohol or added water for rolling

[Merlin]

When rolling with phenolic I have seen recommendations for alcohol plus a percentage of water. Does anyone agree? If you are rolling stars with phenolic and your monocapa has phenolic and the BP prime has phenolic why would you need water added to ethanol?

[MinamotoKobayashi]

Hi.

For Jopete's formulas (that contains both phenolic resin and dextrin) he suggest 67% water and 33% ethyl alcohol. I use this formula also for Monocapa.

Here in Italy denhaturated ethyl alcohol contains about 10% of water itself, so the results may differ a little bit.

 

Sincerely I do not see any advantage to use water with phenolic resin (or red gum) only.

It can create issues such has trapped water or worse aluminum/magnalium oxydation.

[JOPETES]

Hi, Merlin. The phenolic resin that I tried contained or was processed with hexamine, is what I was able to get in his day here in Spain. For this phenolic resin was enough 33 or 35% alcohol to dissolve the resin and the rest of water dissolved dextrin making the stars quite hard with the advantage of being able to roll well the stars without being sticky. if you use more percentage of alcohol the phenolic resin becomes more soluble and it becomes more sticky and more difficult to roll the stars. There are many different types of phenolic resins on the market and each has slightly different characteristics. I stopped using it in color formulas because the stars burned too quickly, but I used it in the monolayer, replacing the acroid resin, which was better because it had more burning speed. If you also replace the magnalium with German dark aluminum and use a good charcoal like willow, balsa etc., you do not need a final layer of black powder, a single layer of 0.5 to 0.8mm thick is enough get 100% ignition with moderate to strong openings.

I see that you have replaced dextrin in the black powder with phenolic resin, is that so?

What colors have you made of the pdf?

José

[Merlin]

I added phenolic to my BP prime but left the dextrin in. I also added silicon. Works well. I had 100% ignition will all stars last night. I primed them all except the spider stars with monocapa containing phenolic and BP prime The were all cylinder shells boosted with Spanish flash. I have made several of the colors and Spanish pearl from the pdf. I have not made any with phenolic substituting for red gum. The only phenolic stars I had this time were Neds NX stars which I think use the pdf as basis. They all worked very well even the colors such as red, yellow, blue and pink. They were all pressed stars. I want to be able to roll to get greater quantities quicker. From what I am hearing it sounds like rolling is best with dextrin and phenolic with water/ alcohol spray. One person said they use SGRS rather than dex. I will just have to cautiously give it a try when the weather cools a bit- looking at 100 degrees F next week.

Thanks for your response.

[JOPETES]

Yes, some members of the forum are rolling with phenolics without dextrin or a combination of phenolics and acroids without dextrin respecting the 1: 1 ratio and water / alcohol spray in a suitable proportion to melt phenolics and acroids with very good results.

Merlin, I'd like to see some of your videos to see your results.

[Merlin]

Unfortunately I dont have a suitable camera for videos but I wish I did. My efforts are me alone loading, and firing as I dont want anyone in the danger zone. Maybe next year. The breaks seem very good to me as well as ignition. The breaks have improved dramatically since I added the slow booster. BP alone just doesnt give the shy filling brakes. Oddly, people watching are impressed by the simple charcoal based comps.

You go to the efforts of making good color shells and then shoot a firedust or spider like C6 and it gets attention as do the Winokurs. But then variety is whats makes the show. Maybe I can get a camera next year and my son can video.

[Arthur]

The average mobile phone from the last ten years has a OK camera. Certainly many folk have access to one (with or without a SIM card) They don't need a SIM to take pictures maybe a microSD though.

[Sulphurstan]

Arthur, yes of course, but the delay for focusing on an exploding shell in the dark is just a pain, how many times the videos taken by my wife or daughters with a pretty expensive phone Samsung s6 maybe (?) we're just super disappointing...

Colors are also often just "overhued". Well not easy. Do you have experience with videoing shells with a mobile? Special modus to be used?

[BetICouldMake1]

Often a 3rd party camera app will give you more controls to better film fireworks, though manual controls are seeming more common on stock camera apps now. Setting focus to infinite with a low ISO is a good start. At the very least you want to turn off any "low light" settings-they will wash out your video. I've also found that waiting for total darkness yeilds better results than filming in low light around dusk. This page has some good tips https://www.techlicious.com/tip/smartphone-photo-tips-for-fireworks/

[Sulphurstan]

Oh, that's a good link! Thanks!

[braddsn]

Merlin, as you know all of the formulas that I use (except for TT, C6, D-1, and a couple others) are from the Jopetes .PDF. I rolled all of the stars using the 91% isoproply alcohol (I bought at Wal-Mart) in it's pure form. There is already water in it, it is 91% iso and 9% water. It works perfect. Just replace redgum 1:1 with phenolic. Hopefully that helps. If you have other questions, I will try to answer.