Ever want to build your own fireworks?

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Originally Posted by Steelforge

I did something similar when I was a kid.

I got hold of some rim-fire cartridges, and used pliers to pull the bullets out, then used a needle to pick the propellant out of each one so i had a little pile on the desk.

You can probably already see where I'm going with this. One cartridge I picked a little too hard and the resulting explosion set the pile off. The bang was huge, fortunately my parents were out and didn't hear it - or see me stumbling around half blinded with a blackened face, and blackened and throbbing hands. The cartridge I'd been holding looked like a half peeled banana, and everything on my desk had been blown across the room in all driections.

Thankfully I was more stunned than hurt, and managed to clean everything up so nobody found out!

I don't do anything like that these days, though in recent years I confess I may have inserted large fireworks into large pumpkins to vaporize them. :D

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Ha, since we're into fireworks confessions, I took a roadtrip with my best friend and his parents to South Dakota. We were able to buy some "real" fireworks there rather than what's legal in Minnesota. We bought firecrackers, bottle rockets, etc. I also bought a large rocket about 16" tall and about 1/2" wide with a large fuse at the bottom. I lit it in the driveway when I got home and the stupid fuse fizzled as it reached the rocket and did nothing. That angered me and I was determined to get some bang out of that thing. I sawed the nose off and dumped out the silvery powder inside in a pile. I threw matches in the pile from a "safe" distance. Nothing. I got some on my fingers and noticed that some of the powder from my fingers sparked when I lit a match. I put a few lit matches on the top of the powder pile, grabbed a big pinch of the powder and sprinkled that over the flame. FLASH!! I had the fortune not to be leaning over the pile. A large ball of white hot light. Whew!!!!!

The only problem was the entire palm of my right hand literally became a burn blister within a few minutes; the entire palm.

My pyrotechnic days were over. :)

Chris L

Ooo, fireworks confessions...soudns fun.
In my younger, dumber days, a friend and I got our hands on a big tub of black powder. We decided to make our own fireworkds (I guess more accurately, they were tiny little bombs...but we had no bad intent, and wanted nothing more than some harmless (to others) fun.

We made "firecrackers" our of magic marker caps, black powder, and cannon fuse, some of the more fun ones included a napkin, fuse, rubber bands, and a coffee can. I can still hear the ringing-ears giggling from both of us after that beast went off. The air was full of smoke, the can was torn apart, and we were both, by nothing but the sheer grace of God, any worse off, save for the temporary hearing loss.

Ahhh...mispent youth. That same friend, about 10 years later, and I sent a little raft out onto a lake, filled with white gas (camping stove gas) and large report firecrackers (the new crappy "m-60" type), and proceeded to launch roman candles at it (we used to be very stupid, apparently). Well, it hit, lit, then quickly expldoed, shooting flaming white gass all over the beach, where it burnt out quite quickly, and spilled the amjority of it onthothe waves, where it burned for a minute or so...a quite lovely effect...

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Originally Posted by smokelaw1

Ooo, fireworks confessions...soudns fun.
In my younger, dumber days, a friend and I got our hands on a big tub of black powder. We decided to make our own fireworkds (I guess more accurately, they were tiny little bombs...but we had no bad intent, and wanted nothing more than some harmless (to others) fun.

We made "firecrackers" our of magic marker caps, black powder, and cannon fuse, some of the more fun ones included a napkin, fuse, rubber bands, and a coffee can. I can still hear the ringing-ears giggling from both of us after that beast went off. The air was full of smoke, the can was torn apart, and we were both, by nothing but the sheer grace of God, any worse off, save for the temporary hearing loss.

Ahhh...mispent youth. That same friend, about 10 years later, and I sent a little raft out onto a lake, filled with white gas (camping stove gas) and large report firecrackers (the new crappy "m-60" type), and proceeded to launch roman candles at it (we used to be very stupid, apparently). Well, it hit, lit, then quickly expldoed, shooting flaming white gass all over the beach, where it burnt out quite quickly, and spilled the amjority of it onthothe waves, where it burned for a minute or so...a quite lovely effect...

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I'm amazed I never became a pyromaniac. Playing with fire was too fun as a kid. Soaking tennis balls in gasoline and playing catch at dusk with leather gloves, stapling old rags wrapped tightly around each end of a long stick, dipping the ends in gas and having a flaming baton. Ok, that's enough. Youth.

:gaah::gaah::gaah: I have three small boys. I'm absolutely certain I'll be paying for those times threefold. Fire is BAD. FIRE IS BAD!!!!!!!

Chris L

when I was in the military I used to love to burn the cheese charges after a day in the field!

YouTube - Burning Cheese Charges

I think thermite could be fun :w

Maybe get some steel as a side effect :D

The kids down the street and I made a bomb by filling a plastic apricot with black powder. We had trouble with fuses. When it looked like it was out I reached into the bucket of sand in which we lit the thing and it blew up when my hand was an inch away. It blew the sand out of the bucket with enough force to fill my hand and fingers with hundreds of bleeding holes. The skin on my hand was badly burnt too. I am very luycky I didn't lose my fingers.

Fake video. Or a Darwin Award in the making.:rofl2: In all seriousness, if you want to make your own fireworks, join PGI (Pyrotechnics Guild International), go to 1 of their conferences & learn from people who've been doing it for a few years, no? You'd be building/setting them off under controlled conditions.

I've been a professional pyrotechnician for 9 years (my avatar is a recent show)--these things can kill you if you don't respect them.

My confession-list is quite long, but here is a few highlights:
When I was really small we (my neighbor and me) would fill up empty rifle cartridges with match-heads and beat them with a hammer until they blew up.
As I grew older I found out that the paper strips with 100 tiny charges in them got really loud if folded and rolled right.
Later on I found out how to salvage fireworks that didn't go off and use the blackpowder from them:) The highlight of that was at the highschool graduation when the principal gave me and a friend the go believing that the explotion was going to be a lot smaller than it was (about 2" diameter and 2" high pure blackpowder with approx 1" of duct-tape around it to to get more pressure in the explotion, we had dual electric ignition) The entire class and some school officials were standing about 200' away and we still felt a decent punch in the chest. It could be heard for miles (had a friend living some miles away call me wondering if I had heard it too)
A co-worker and me built a bottle rocket with a 1 lb engine in it a couple of years ago, fun and challenging, but it is a lot of work! (math and all kinds of crap)

The main thing I learnt is: use earplugs, always use either a LONG fuse or electrical ignition and most important, have a long distance between you and whatever is blowing up.

PA23-250: sounds like an awesome job you have!! Is it possible to get some kind of amateur rating for pyrotechnics? And do you fly/own an Aztec? Sounds awesome!

Homemade Fireworks, huh?
Think Black Powder, paper towel rolls, electrical tape and cannon fuse. I got a maximum of three 'Firecrackers' per pound of Black Powder. I know that for a fact, because I bought it in Orange one pound cans. That was in the late sixties.
Sometimes, they sounded like Judgment Day!

Jeeter (Ka-BOOM)