61 replies to this topic

[Phoenix]

Yes, that's pretty much what mine did - with apparent blind inserts, except that a few seconds later they went off on the ground in the field I was aiming the cake over. My construction was slightly different - I drilled a hole through both sides of the tubes and threaded them on, then rolled all seven up into a bundle and taped them together. I have made a few of these cakes, and have had plenty work quite well using cracker fuse. Trouble is, of course, it's a pain to make.

Judging by the behaviour of the inserts, the painted fuse does not ignite from the sides. This should mean that if I made the cake square, keeping the fuse largely straight and preventing the paint from cracking, it might work better. As I said, I'll look into it.

I was going to make another batch sometime soon, as these tests have been with my last batch, which, as I said, was very fragile anyway. I've also found some better string (I think) than what I used before. The last was made from very rough multi stranded jute (which seems to have a looser weave to it than cotton, so is easier to incorporate powder into), which soaked up BP very easily but did not make a smooth, easy-to-thread-into-stuff match. The newer jute has fewer pieces of stick and dead mice and rocks and stuff woven into it, so I'll give that a try.

I have made my match by dumping a hank of string into a bowl of BP slurry and then sorting it out by hand, which was always very messy and the string usually got tangled. The thickness was also not very consistent. Whenever I tried a continuous method of making it I always wasted a lot of BP. However, whilst reading Matt?s and alany's pages, I thought of a low wastage design of match machine. Here it is:

Tall, narrow pipe holds BP slurry, kind of like a sparkler dipping tube. At the bottom is a narrow hole for the string to pass through (wider at the "out" side). ~3cm above this is a dowel through the pipe that the string passes over, so it goes in, up, down, out, to increase the time it spends in the BP.

String is soaked in KNO3 solution to reduce wicking and threaded through the holes, the pipe is filled with slurry, the string is pulled through. As the level of BP falls, the pipe can be refilled regularly, reducing waste it the same way that a tall narrow container rather than a short, wide one does when making sparklers. After the last refill, some will be left clinging to the sides. A plunger is inserted in the pipe and used to push this down to the bottom so the string can take it up. The only waste will be the last bit of BP slurry left stuck to the walls below the dowel, which in a 20mm ID pipe should not be too much.

Matt, I think I remember you saying somewhere that you had made cakes by putting hot glue at the join between two tubes, around the fuse, to stop the flame flashing along it. Is this the case?

[Kembang Api]

Fuse making machine as mention by Alany is truely a working model but it would better to adopt the machine as mention in this website
" http://www.pyrounive.../blackmatch.htm " from pyro universe.com

It is much cleaner and not messy. It take only one person to manufacture the fuse.