273 replies to this topic

[pyrotechnist]

have you spocked to him aswell or herd of him hor seen him.

[Richard H]

It was fairly obvious to be honest! I read about him in Fireworks magazine.

P.S I think we need another chat about spelling

[pyrotechnist]

dam I right to fast and get some mistakes.

[pyrotechnist]

have you seen Ron I went to visit him I hope I can get work experience there.

[Phoenix]

Glitter Fountain Success

Following alany?s advice, I just made a glitter fountain. I only found one fountain formula for which I had all of the chemicals, and this was ?Winokur, Silver B? (by Robert Winokur) which I found on Passfire. It is as follows:

Potassium Nitrate...........59
AF Charcoal....................13
Iron Sulphide..................13
120-325 spherical Al*.....10
Sulphur............................5

*I don?t have any aluminium of this type, so I used my homemade Al powder, which, being ball-milled foil, is probably mostly flake. I don?t know what mesh it is, but it is quite fine.

I made 15g of this composition. All ingredients were fine powders. I rammed it into a 1/2" I.D. tube and used a 7mm nozzle. The length of pressed composition was about 80mm (sorry to mix units, my case formers are imperial and my head is metric). As alany said that glitter compositions can be a bit drossy I included a thin layer of meal BP halfway along to clear the nozzle if it became blocked.

Results

This was the first time I have made a glitter effect, and I am not sure if it worked exactly as it was intended to, as I have nothing to compare it with, but I was very pleased with it. It gave a lot of quite bright orange sparks, (I think these were blobs of dross, looked too bright and heavy for charcoal) and many bright silver flashes ? not the gold or dim silver rubbishy sparks my previous meal/Al fountains gave (although meal/Al hummers worked well) but nice bright silver flashes. The spray averaged about 2 metres tall. The substitution of flake Al for spherical did not seem to compromise its performance. It was also quite long lasting for a fountain of its length.

It was very drossy, and the meal layer did help to clear it when it started to burn less smoothly. It also provided a brief increase in spray height and would make a nice finale to the fountain (which had started to ?cough? a bit by the end)

I got the feeling it would lend itself quite well to a waterfall, and the tubes could be made to burn away with the composition (like lances) reducing the need for dross-busting BP layers. Also the sparks seemed to want to go down, whereas with a charcoal waterfall I made the sparks tended to float upwards, which kind of defeated the object of a water-fall- .

[Richard H]

Sounds excellent! Well done

[alany]

This is my flitter fountian composition:

17 Potassium Nitrate
6 Iron (-100 mesh)
4 Charcoal (airfloat)
3 Sulfur
2 Aluminium (~100 mesh flake flitters - skylighter firefly)

It is a varient of westech/degn pinwheel driver composition. It is screened only, not milled, but well mixed with a 40 mesh screen. The airfloat is important, well if you want the firefly effects it is, without it, or with coarser charcoal it doesn't work as well, plus you already have the fine iron in there for orange spark effects.

Every time I've used it I've gotten a slightly different effect. More or less fireflys depending on the nozzle geometry. Changing about 2/3rds of the KNO3 to BaNO3 might be helpful, but I've never tried it. It is a little drossy, forming a ring of magnetic slag around the nozzle, but I've never had it slag up and explode.

[alany]

Pheonix: I've never tried the FeS containing gerb mix. Where did you get it? I was considering preparing some from iron powder and sulfur in a crucible, but that seems like a hard way to do it.

[Phoenix]

It's part of a chemistry set that someone got for my brother about 15 years ago. I don't have have very much FeS, just a small jar. I searched for a glitter fountain mix in the rec.pyrotechnics archive (nothing obvious) and Passfire, where I found six formulas, five of which had one or more of antimony sulphide/sodium oxalate/barium carbonate/barium nitrate/realgar in, non of which I have.

I had wondered where I could get more FeS, as I liked this fountain so much and don't know how much longer what I have will last. However, one of the first demonstrations that was ever done in my class's chemistry lessons was making iron sulphide. All that the teacher did was mix the finely powdered chemicals chemicals (hey...there's a use for that -325 mesh iron powder, even if it is ultra low carbon and non sparky!) in roughly the right amounts and heap a line on a steel tray. This was then heated from underneath until it ignited and the reaction was apparantly then self sustaining, as a glow quickly moved through the mixture. I don't see why this couldnt be done on a production scale.

Weingart states that black copper sulphide is "quite easy to make."
His method is to pack a crucible with scrap copper and an excess of sulphur, and cover an place in a hot fire for an hour, after which they will have reacted and excess sulphur evaporated. I'm sure the procedure could be used for iron, though the reaction might be a little brisker. I would imagine that powdering the resultant lump of iron sulphide would be a bugger to say the least though, as the lumps in my chemistry set were rock hard, and they were only abut 1cm cubes. a sledgehammer would probably do the trick.

[alany]

I've read that metal (tri)sulfides can be used in place of Antimony Trisulfide with similar effects, Bismuth Trisulfide being suggested. It would be cheaper and less toxic as well but I don't know of any source of it?

IIRC there are several Iron Sulfides, there is pyrite FeS2 which is golden and fairly hard, and FeS which is normally black (due to impurities), and Fe2S3 which is also black I think? I gather Winokur is refering to FeS, Iron (II) or Ferrous Sulfide?

Sources for Sodium Oxalate might be hardware stores, often they carry oxalic acid which can be neturalised with Sodium Carbonate. It is also often available from photographic and pottery supply stores. Barium Carbonate should be available from pottery supply stores, that's where I get mine. If you have nitric acid you can make it into Barium Nitrate fairly easily. Antimony Trisulfide and Realgar are more difficult to find, not that I really want to fool around with Realgar much.

[BigG]

This thread is not about suppliers. Keep this to the proper thread. List of materials and where to get them has been given so many times before. Please search before posting.

Bismuth trisulfide is not popular choice for glitter. It is too expensive. It?s very useful in dragon eggs, but for glitter and flitter other metal oxides are better. A simple source is iron (III) oxide (Fe2O3), which together with atomised aluminium can be utilized for good glitter. It?s also use extensively commercially.

Last but not least ? the use of aluminium foil can work, but note that the foil you by in the supermarket can contain up to 45%(!) other materials ? for example ? tin, iron, sulphides, oxides etc. I don?t know if this effect safety, but unless you stick to the same brand each time then you might get very different effects.

[Pyromaster2003]

Isn't Iron Oxide and Aluminium powder thermite!? Would surely break any casings and even the nozzels down in seconds?

[BigG]

Lets assume you are right? What about formulation? It like saying that everything containing: KNO3, C and S are as hot as black powder. It?s all in the formula.

The following is by Simizu - it's for stars, but from experience, works resnobly okay for fountains.

Glitter:

KNO3 50
Pine Charcoal 6.9
S 20
Atomized Al 17.3
Fe2O3 5.8

Edited by BigG, 04 January 2004 - 11:51 AM.

[alany]

BigG: I've never seen Bismuth Trisulfide used in crackle cores, I think you might be thinking of the Trioxide or Subcarbonate which is used in place of Red Lead?

I don't believe I strayed too far from the topic either. :-)

In my experence Iron Oxide and Aluminium glitters are not very good. I've tried W25 for example and found it to be worse than bicarbonate glitters. Maybe this Shimizu one you just posted will change my mind, I'll give it a go. Really good glitters seem to need Antimony Trisulfide, at least for a nice long delay, MgAl makes them dense and crackly too.

What I'd really like to know is how they do coloured glitters?

[Richard H]

BigG, It's ok to post sources for chemicals relevent to a particular topic, e.g. Sodium Oxalate, Antimony Trisulphide in this case. However as a note to members, a quick search will probably answer or at least help to answer queries in relation to sourcing a chemical.