The highs and lows of this years shows.

[killforfood]

This was my first year shooting shows with my brothers. I'm not sure why I waited so long to join them but now I'm hooked solid. No more "I'm Busy" excuses. Next year I'm "All In".

 

This week we talked about what we liked about the shows and what we will do different next year. Safety was high on my list. I was using borrowed turnouts that didn't fit, my helmet had no visor and I wasn't wearing a Nomex hood. I thought safety glasses would be good enough but after having a bunch of my beard singed off, I changed my mind. I got on E-bay and bought a full set of turn outs that fit and a helmet with a visor. I'm also getting a Nomex hood and a half face gas mask to wear on no wind days. I also need to get better knee pads.

 

I had an incident during the last show that could have ended badly but fortunately didn't. we were loading shells and I ran out of the good rubber bands to secure the fuses with. No biggy, I strapped the last few fuses down with the thin little rubber bands that come on the shells to keep the quick match from unraveling. It turned out to be a bad idea because while I was lighting shells; the concussions broke some of the adjacent rubber bands loose and blew the fuses around. One of the fuses flipped over the back of the rack. In my haste to keep the show going, I reached right over the top of loaded tubes to grab it and light it. I knew it was a dumb move the instant I did it. My brother was watching me from close behind and said it happened faster than he could yell at me. Next year I know just to move on and let one of my brothers light it after I've cleared that rack. The night before we were using a brand of shell with very loose fuse covers . The paper covers were falling off of the visco ends from the concussions of adjacent shell launches. We had quite a few sympathetic launches from stray sparks landing on exposed fuses. I'm just glad that didn't happen the night when I stupidly reached over the top of loaded tubes.

 

At St Paul, we were able to dig holes to put the multi shot boxes into. We had a couple boxes blow out a bunch of plugs through the bottom of the boxes. We think that in part it may have been due to the holes that we dug having uneven or soft bottoms. The last couple nights at St Paul, we leveled and tamped the bottom of the holes till they were smooth as a Priest's lap before placing the multi shot boxes in them. We had no more incidents after that.

 

We really enjoyed the Woodburn show. The crowd was much closer and we could hear the cheers even through our earplugs and constant whump boom, whump boom. For this show we dropped down to 3" inch shells. Even with the smaller shell, I think the Woodburn crowd got a better show because of the close proximity. At St Paul, we can't even see the people in the Rodeo stands.

 

At Woodburn we were set up on the infield of a ball diamond so digging in the boxes was not an option. Instead Western Fireworks provided these big long plywood boxes to set them in. We won't be using those again. They were so tall that the fan shaped comet boxes would have been bouncing comets off of the inside walls. We staked those outside of the plywood boxes. It also made it difficult for us to see if the multi shot boxes were behaving properly during the show. We had to get close and peer over the side. There is no way I was going to hang over the side and relight a box if it went out. Garden stakes and baling wire worked much better. That's what we will use to secure all of the boxes next year at Woodburn.

 

Our finale died about halfway through at Woodburn and we really don' know why. We were watching close and saw it the instant it petered out right in the middle of some quick match.. I was pretty proud of myself for beating both of my Brothers to the other end of the fuse but after lighting it and having the rest of the finale go up inches from my face… Yah, I think I'll run a little slower next year. we'll also be checking fuses a little closer next year.

 

All in all a great experience for me. I learned a lot and enjoyed more time with my Brothers than we've had in years. Even my daughter in-law to be helped out one night. Can't wait for next year.

 

Edited July 10, 2011 by killforfood