34 replies to this topic

[italteen3]

Started this thread figuring we have a thread for shells why not one for cakes. Searched for a good 20 minutes with no sucess in finding a thread specifically for cakes so here it goes.

Here is a picture of my cake, as per my requirements. I wanted it to be reloadable considering I spent a tad high price for the nice tubes. The cake represents a cake I saw over 8 years ago and the tubes are out and neat looking only for my own nostalgic reasons. What I did was take two 1/2" pieces of plywood. One was drilled with 10 1 1/4" holes then sanded to a tad under 1 5/16" for a tight fitting of the 1 5/16" OD mortars. The mortars themselves had a plug glued, glue was hot-melt both inside mortar and at the bottom. The tubes then were tightly put into the drilled holes after being drilled for the fuse.

Would help if I put the pics in
First
Second
Third

Vis-quick was chosen as I have no blackmatch at the moment due to no ball mill . The first five shot were placed 1/4-1/2" apart and fused the traditional method to help prevent blow-through. The last five shots were placed much closer and fused straight to encourage blow-through or atleast have a nice fast finale. Shells weigh approx 15 grams and lift used is 1.7 grams of Goex 2FA, tad more than the 1/10 rule as they are smaller shells.

Any criticisms or suggestions would be appreciated!

Guess we could also discuss the different methods of construction, effects, timing, proper safety, etc. Like in the shells thread.

EDITAlso the cake was not loaded with anything but fuse in my house, for obvious reasons. Just there for some pics.

Edited by italteen3, 20 April 2005 - 06:34 PM.

[RegimentalPyro]

Nice looking cake!

I'm of the opinion that a cake's killer feature is the ability to fuse it in different ways. With this we can easily implement such features as quickened finale's, Z fans and simultaneous barrages.

Passfire outlined a nice way of setting off barrages of X tubes with their reloadable fancake. Basically the firing tubes are threaded onto a small brass pipe with holes in it. Blackmatch is inserted in the brass pipe. When it takes fire all tubes fire at once as the blackmatch "quickmatches" due to confinement.

I've tried this and it works well. See my early effort here

[Andrew]

so you didn't go for the "two tone paint... purple to green with sparkley bits", "and tassels" then. Looks nice. You'll have to post some videos of it in action.

[Kembang Api]

Nice looking tube and very well done.

It looks to me from the picture that you use a green fuse which is kind of fast but will not produce one after another kind of effect (time shot) unless you use a slower fuse. To produce a simultaneous kind of firing, you certainly need a blackmatch fuse that you cover it with some kind of tape.

I think the fuse is kind of too long. It might light the other tube. As we all know that green fuse have a tendency of moving, when lighted. Making the fuse short and slow will be safer and controllable.

I had used this green fuse before and to slow down, I rap it with a sticky paper tape about 4 turns and real tight.

I hope my explanation is clear enough to understand.

[italteen3]

Thanks guys for the replies! Yes the tubes definately are nice. Pretty durable as they are still in good condition and one tube I used to test has withstood atleast 5 shots through it no problem so the rack will see a lot of use.

Regimental I did see that video before, NICE cake. If you ever do get around to making that with more shots share the video .

Fired it last night. Location was an abandoned parking lot surrounded by a field and woods. Nice hard pavement for stability so I decided against a back yard or a grass field as it was to close to houses. 10 small,2g, titanium salutes were used, double fused with 3/32" American visco cut at sharp angles for a greater chance of ignition.

It was an awesome cake. First five shots went off perfect, not too fast not to slow just how I wanted. Only thing is the fourth shot landed on the ground about 10 feet away from the cake and went off, my guess is a BP slurry for a prime on the angled visco would have prevented this(I suspect the fuse smouldered a little on way up then ignited on the way down). I am ruling out any other possibilities such as poor lift because everything was weighed carefully and I have had a similar incident with a test shell going off 15 seconds after it hit the ground. All safety precautions were taken so no damage or injury occured when the shell went off on the ground.

The fifth shot was fine into the finale which went off very nicely and just as I planned, fast.

Kembang, I did not experience side spit ignition but I guess as a precaution for all the hard work I put into it a tape protector could help prevent earlier ignition. Your English was fine I understood it perfectly, and thanks for the advice I will take it.

Video will hopefully be up within a day or two if I can get access to a comp with an IEEE card.

Will be trying some mines with falling leaves visco and crackling fuse soon too. If you guys have any vids please share I would love to see them

[1145climber]

hey. heres a few pics of my ten-minute-cake:







i was wondering... because the fuse holes are lined up, will it mess up the speed of the visco? i expect it to be faster than usual, but not have them all go off in order but in less than like 10 seconds... i figure, 1.5 feet of visco in the configuration would burn as fast as a little less than a foot usually would, but im not sure. Is my ten-minute-cake horrifically hideously horrible? please give me some comments. thanks.

[RegimentalPyro]

The speed of the visco will not be affected but you will almost certainly have problems with one tube setting the next off unless the caulking between tubes is REALLY good.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the looks of the fusing what I reckon you're after is each tube firing after a short pause. I suspect this cake will fire 6 tubes at once, short pause, then the next six, short pause etc.

In addition those tubes look to be a little thin. Have you tried firing single stars from them before? Did they hold up OK?

[1145climber]

the tubes actually hold up great. ive done 5 test fires from the same tube and it was fine. damn, i was hoping that they wouldnt fire off that quickly, but seeing as it only took me like 1o minutes to build, i guess ill just make the next one better. thanks for the advice

[italteen3]

The speed of the visco will not be affected but you will almost certainly have problems with one tube setting the next off unless the caulking between tubes is REALLY good.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from the looks of the fusing what I reckon you're after is each tube firing after a short pause. I suspect this cake will fire 6 tubes at once, short pause, then the next six, short pause etc.

In addition those tubes look to be a little thin. Have you tried firing single stars from them before? Did they hold up OK?

Exactly what Regimentalpyro said will happen. The lift gases from one tube can easily travel through the fuse hole into the next tube igniting the lift to that tube. That happens even more so if the hole is noticeably bigger than the fuse, which is what it seems to be.

Usually the fuse goes in a criss-crossing pattern so that the fuse holes are not lined up, as in the first picture of my cake(for the bottom five shots). This helps to minimize the blow-through.

When fusing cakes for a rapid firing using many short lengths of fuse instead of one continous fuse, as we both have done, some sort of tape or protector must be used as one simple shot going off could ignite an adjacent row of tubes with an exposed prime.

[1145climber]

aright, cool. well, its not exactly what i wanted, but it might be cool to see 6 bursts of 6. i figure, i might as well try it out, right?

also, i decided i might want to try out some salutes too, but seeing as my tubes are about 1 cm diameter, i decided to not try to make them. instead, ive made me some make-shift fire-cracker salutes... i test fired one, and it went off only about 10 feet above the cake, but hey, its a salute, so what does that matter? is this a dumb idea? heres a picture of my firecrackers wrapped with tape that extends about .75 cm past the end to prevent (hopefully) the fuse from igniting right at the base of the firecracker, which seems to have worked, as well as to build them up to 1 cm diameter:




is this a dumb idea?

Edited by 1145climber, 09 May 2005 - 12:56 AM.

[al93535]

Here is the cake I made. A 31 shot, 15 7/8" tubes, and 16 1-1/8" tubes. Hand rolled tubes, fused with 3/32" fuse, 1-1/4" between each shot. what do you think? I will have 20 colored shells, 6 salutes, and 5 mines.

Edited by al93535, 09 May 2005 - 05:23 AM.

[Lil_Guppy]

VERY impressive looking cake there al93535 Are the tubes just straight Kraft, or are they a composite type of tube (e.g. manilla/Kraft). What GSM/lb is the Kraft, what are the wall thicknesses, etc if you don't mind me asking.

I have been meaning to get my modular cake (which is loosley based on the set up of Passfire's Z-Fan cake) up and running. The tubes are all ready to glue onto the backing. I have just gotten a bit sidetracked lately. Hopefully I will get around to making a cake in the next month or so.

Edited by Lil_Guppy, 09 May 2005 - 07:50 AM.

[al93535]

The tubes are plain kraft with wood glue. The kraft paper is 70 lbs, and the tubes are about 3/32" thick. It took me about a week to roll all the tubes, plug them, fuse them and glue them. Even though the cake is tough, and could handle many repeated firings, I couldn't re-fuse it unless I took it apart. I made this back in January, when I was begining to make items for the 4th of July. Its been hard looking at it and not lighting it. I can't wait to see how it performs. There should be about 3 seconds between shots. So about one half to one second after the shell breaks or the salute explodes the next shot will light. The last four shots (a shell, mine, salute and shell) should all fire within 1 second.

[italteen3]

Having eased off pyro for a few months after July 4th I decided to start up again but on a small scale. I am still new/inexperienced to cakes apart from a few mine-type and salute cakes I have made.

I have mostly been reading some new books and writing/sketching in my journal for new shell ideas and ideas for cakes I would one day like to create and compete in the PGI with but I have to start small. So I have one cake Im going to share my idea with and ask for some help/comments/criticism.

It is a 40 shot Z-fan type cake. 36 shots are 1/2" comets 4 rows of 9. First 3 rows of 9 fire in a fanning pattern in which the fourth row is quickmatched for a "wall" of silver followed by 4 quickmatched titanium salute finale with same silver comp for a tail.

The comp for the silver is from a Skylighter Newsletter titled "Silver Comet Formula"
KNO3 - 54%
Airfloat - 8%
Sulfur - 18%
Granular Al - 9%
Mg/Al - 3% (-200 mesh)
Antimony Sulfide - 3%
Dextrin - 5%
25% water/75% alcohol
Anyone ever use this comp or anything similar to it? I was thinking of adding 1% Boric Acid good/bad?

Just waiting on the 1/2" star pump from Wolter and Im set.

[karlfoxman]

Well thought i would load up my candle fan, this is to test the willow stars burn times. Each tube is from a reclaimed 19 shot kimbolton cake (empty) these tubes are loaded with 3.7 g of fast willow lift and 15 8mm pumped willow stars. They are fused with visco and quickmatch 0.8 sec between tubes. Here is pictures for you to see.

TUBES ON RACK

BEING FUSED

DONE

ANOTHER VIEW

Will post video later tonight,

Karl