DrDerekDoctors

i bought a 10kg bag of the cheap stuff from morrisons for ?1:49, and i've only used 500g so far. if you can't find any at all, PM me and i could send you a bit.

I have a local Morrisons so I'll look there, thanks. Is it their own brand one?

As far as im aware any kitty litter will do. Even as it comes from the pack should be ok for a hard rammed end plug. Its the way to go, you will get very very strong end plugs using this. If your making a nozzle reduce the clumps of litter to powder.

Thanks! My other fear is that obviously there are some flash compositions which are potassium nitrate and aluminium powder based. I don't want to be inadvertantly making something like that so I suppose it's best to start with something like a pine charcoal based fountain rather than using the aluminium powder I have?

As far as I know the aluminium I have is probably not the kind which can be used to make flash (as it's the Tiranti stuff rather than the titchy tiny stuff), but I'd prefer to play it safe.

You deffinately don't want a fountain exploding on you! Pretty scary moment when you see the fountain start then for it to blow it's self to pieces! Had one do it to me a few weeks back, no idea why. But it acted like flash powder rather than fountain comp.

Indeed not. Righty, I shall look up some fountain comps. I've got a week off of work next week which should give me plenty of time to roll a suitable tube and let it dry. Still kinda' wary about buying kitty litter, though, I always think I'll choose the one brand which isn't bentonite clay but rather something entirely useless. Maybe I'll stick with wooden plugs for now.

Btw, sorry Richard, I didn't realise that banger discussion was verboten.

Ah, I have some Aluminium powder I got from from a local art store so I shall try a fountain of that. Although as I say I don't have proper black powder but rather meal powder, will I still be able to compact this and achieve a fountain?

Congrats on making your first salute, but if you re going to make pyro your hobby, you must take safety a bit more seriously, otherwise you will get injured. After reading thru your post, i can point out a few elementary errors you made.

Righty.

Firstly if you had to run away after lighting your salute, your fuse was too short. You should never HAVE to run away from a lit firework. If you dont want to waste precious visco, you can wrap a piece of touch paper around the end, this will also give you a much longer ignition time.

Looking at the movie there's 10 seconds from lighting to it going off, so yeah, I think I would prefer something like 30 although even with 10 seconds I could have probably walked back at a leisurely pace. I just wanted to make sure I was out of shot.

Secondly, you should never put a salute on a loose surface, like a flower pot! It could easily have shattered and sent pieces everywhere.

Indeed, it was a bad choice but somewhat of a spur of the moment one when my mum pointed out she couldn't see the firework when it was on the floor.

Thirdly, you should make sure (as far as possible) that pieces of your firework dont land in other peoples gardens.

Yeah. I did check to make sure that none of the neighbours for 2 gardens either side weren't in them. In future I'll try to find a nice remote field to test things.

And one other tip, not to do with safety......you'll get better results if you put the fuse in the centre of the tube rather than the end, specially when using BP

Yeah, I hear that but I wasn't sure that my tube would stand up to the drilling. Plus there's something nice looking about an end-fused firework.

Andy

P.S............how did you manage to burn your thumb lighting a salute??

Ah, well as I used the thicker of the two fuses and because of the crappy matches I used necessitating that I get my fingers very close to the end of said fuse, my thumb caught a fair bit of the sparks when it ignited.