booom1

The foil tape goes over the fuse to lance section only. I guess you could wrap the rest of the sticky in regular old foil or kraft paper if you want but we've never had a problem with premature ignition with one exception. We cued a 5 gallon fuel b**b that was ten feet in front of it a little early. In fact about ten minutes early, and that would have blown foil wrap right off anyways. DO NOT use quickmatch. It's way to fast and violent and WILL tear itself off a large percentage of your lances. If you are going to open the show with it I wouldn't bother covering the sticky match at all.

Excellent. Cheers. I had wondered about quickmatch. I had a wee go a while back and the QM did indeed pull off. Any recommended suppliers? Low smoke?

Interesting variation on framing here, but hit heavy on resources!!!!
http://www.firework....s/lancework.htm

It really depends on what I'm making, I did an 8 foot diameter smiley face with 3/4" flexible PVC, I do flags and some other stuff with plywood. When I use a solid mount like the plywood I always paint it black. As for securing it also depends on the type of lance you are using. The lance we used to get up until this year I would just run screws through the board or PVC and you could screw the lance onto the end of the screw. One end of the lance was very much like a cigarette butt. This year we used nails and hot glue because the new style lance wouldn't screw on properly. I always fuse lance with medium sticky match and use foil tape to secure it. The sticky tape on it's own without the foil will have a somewhat reliable 10 percent failure rate, in my experience.

Thanks for all that. Do you foil over all of the tapematch - i.e. the bit between the lances as well as over the tip?

I always thought the shop-bought lancework used the brown paper covered QM. Is that the case? Is it just too fiddly to use?

Not tried paper rope for intricate work, but for fire drawings (see booom.org.uk for simple examples), it is perfect.

We use HERAS security fence panels as support and attach the rope to the wire mesh with sack ties. Burns and stays in tact for good 10 minutes.

The smallest dia rope we use is around 40mm, but if SOMIC do smaller stuff, could be worth a try for your lettering.

Tis cheap (ish) and very quick to construct drawing.

Ofcourse, lancework is much more defined and multi-colourful. Depends what the customer wants really.

At a little over 100m I use 6" (16cm) spacing. Depends a lot on how big your letters are.

Matter of interest, what do you use as a back board and how do you fix your lances to it? I had been told that a pin through the back of the board was one method. Glueing another. But what glue is best?

I played around with some lancres recently, and tried to use Superglue, but I think it was just too damn cold for it to set quickly enough. Still sticks yer skin together in no time though!

What kind of match do you use and how do you fix it to the lance end?

Cheers
Keith Booom!

Not sure what you are trying to do, but for fire drawings (several feet high), we use paraffin-soaked paper rope.

The rope we use is "Supersoft" from these guys: http://www.somic.co....ids -161-0.aspx

Comes in bales of 25m and differing diameters.

What they don't tell you when you order is that if you order at least 2 or 3 bales at once, the price drops considerably compared to ordering just one bale.

Last order we did was for 75m and came in at £1/m plus VAT plus postage (£9)

Might not be suitable for a small lettering job.