mike_au

my thought was as a hardener it might be interesting with a organic fuel and a salt for color. could be a nice hard star.

I don't think it would work like that. As I understand it the hardener catalyzes a reaction in the other components of the resin/putty and causes them to harden so it would only result in a hard star if your star also contained the a decent amount of the putty which is generally non-flammable.

It might be interesting for some chemistry stuff, but I don't think it is particularly useful for pyro.

I would dilute the acid. I would not recommend mixing the BaCO3 with water prior to mixing.

Mixing water and acid, and mixing carbonates with acid are both exothermic reactions (they release heat) that heat can cause localised boiling which can spit hot acid around the place.

Since barium carbonate is barely soluble in plain water, premixing them won't produce a solution. It would be essentially the same as throwing some carbonate in at the same time as some water. You will get significantly more heat.

Lower concentration acids will react more slowly and therefore produce heat more slowly, which is why I would recommend diluting the acid before you start.

Remember the rule "Do as you ought-a, add acid to water" (and if you can use cold water, even better).

Maybe you're somewhere with rather lower humidity than the north of the UK!

You might be right there

Perth, Western Australia. Not exactly known for being a particularly wet area.

In a 3" I tend to use about 1/10.

I haven't experimented with it a great deal so I don't know if that is "optimal" but it looks good to me.

For future reference, I think access via the IP address has been disabled for some security reasons, which is partially why I was stalling on it in the first place.

There really shouldn't be any security issues with using a hosts entry. It is exactly the same as connecting to the site normally except that it skips the "connect to another machine to find out the IP address" step, because it already has the IP address stored. Back in the day it was how everything on the internet worked.


In fact, if the DNS was working, the website wouldn't be able to tell the difference between someone who was using DNS vs someone who is using hosts.