jamesy

Hi All

My sites are

www.pyrowiki.com
www.pyroguide.com
www.pyropedia.com

They all link to the same place :-)

Jamesy

What?s nitric acid used for on the agricultural side of things?

It may be easier for you to make a 2 inch mortar than pay the postage, Just find/make a 2 inch former go down to the newsagents or wherever and buy 3 sheets of cardboard the type used for school projects and carefully roll them around the former one by one I did this to get a good 1.5 inch tube within 20 minutes all layers were lightly glued with PVA. I was very impressed by the one I made but then to be depressed when I accidentally blew it to bits with 3.5 grams of very hot balsa bp, the tube was for testing purposes.

Cool, can you make good BP out of balsa wood ?

I am seriously considering about getting my basic firearms licence. With it you can buy ANY type of commercial grade BP and ANY type of fuse. A friend of mine bought a 250 meter roll of 2mm green visco fuse for $25 bucks and 2 kg of commercial BP @ $16 per kilo. At least this way you can be assured you have good quality BP.

I have bought rocket tooling from Firefox-Fx and made it with my home made BP and they perform really poorly. I have to go back to the basics and make the rocket by hand and make a smaller nozzle hole and deeper core. I can only put this down to the quality of my BP. It really makes me disappointed when i ball mill it for at least 6 hours, dampen it, granulate it and dry it in a heat box. I don't know if skylighter make rocket tooling for commercial grade BP but it sure does not work all that well with home made BP.

Anyone else have the some problem... It just seems easier to buy commercial BP (which I might add comes from a firework supplier) for $16 per kilo for fireworks that really require the performance of good BP. Sure home made BP has it's uses but.... i dunno.

Finding nitric acid in AUS is going to be very hard if not impossible. It might be easier to get some sulphuric acid and turn that to nitric but that’s still allot of work. Although I think Alany may have had some nitric acid some time I can't remember but I think I read it somewhere on his site. good luck to you anyway, did you manage to find a 2 inch mortor.

There is some basic information on pyrowiki regarding nitric acid that originated from Wouter Visser if you want to look. But in my opinion, it is a difficult and a dangerous chemical to manufacture. Even making strontium and barium nitrates with it is a dangerous exercise from what I have read. You can make lovely red, greens etc with potassium chlorate and carbonates. Mr Alan Yates has a really good recipe for his own red using the mentioned chemicals. Try making his granite star; it's a really cool lime green.

To be honest with you (and this is only my thoughts), although it would be great to make really bright reds/greens etc... in Aus we simply don't have the chemicals freely available to make them. Personally I get more enjoyment in making a firework that actually does what it's supposed to. For example, making shells burst symmetrically, making fountains that fire a plume really high, rockets the are really powerful that go fast and straight etc. To me, at this stage anyway, it's about mastering the art as opposed to making colours :-)

Have you tried spotlight for your tubes ?????

I'd like to know where to get SGRS too I think its rather hard to get though.

It's quite annoying actually. I mean at the end of the day it's just rice starch...

Alany a while ago said I could get it from Coles in the Asian section, but I have had no luck :-(

Can anyone in Aus who has bought SGRS from an Asian shop show me a photo of the packaging. I have tried buying this stuff from a million Asian grocery stores and they all think I have two heads. They keep showing me SGR flour... which my understanding is not the same.

Or, if someone knows where to get it and is happy to buy and ship to me (I will pay you before getting it via paypal).

It's driving me nuts :-)

Thanks