35 replies to this topic

[paul]

[...]The stars need to be very wet before they will take up any comp.[...]

Oh I don?t know if they will work then! Usually the flitter or glitter effect gets lost when using too much water. Maybe this is different with perc. mixtures. But with D1 glitter this problem occurs.

Anyway, I hope they work! Just pressed a few 18mm perc glitter comets with about 15% water, they work fine, but other batches before didn?t with this ammount of water. Depends...

[Jerronimo]

Glitter and flitter are not the same thing,Bleser white flitter is actually a kind of streamer composition.
I think the effect is something like this:
silver shell.

[completebeginner]

when making stars bound with shellac is it required the the shellac be a fine powder or can you disolve it and later add the other ingredients?

Edited by completebeginner, 27 December 2005 - 01:57 AM.

[paul]

For some stars this works, but if a star requires a higher ammount of shellac, then it is required as a fuel and thus it has to be added in powdered form.

It can easily crushed to a fine powder with a elect. coffee grinder.

Hope this helps...

[GBthriller]

Well, I started rolling a batch of Bleser white flitter.
I use 400 mesh bright flake, and they are realy very difficult to roll, a real challenge.
The stars need to be very wet before they will take up any comp.
I use a old plastic candy container with a snapp-on lid (about 25 cm wide and 15cm high) to roll them in, otherwise the flake floats everywhere,it's realy quite handy.
I managed to roll them to 6 mm and just finished the second layer to 8mm with 2:1 white flitter/Bp wich went alot easier.
Now I only need to apply a layer of 1:2 flitter/BP (10mm) and a thin layer of BP prime(11mm).
I hope that will be sufficient priming.

I decided back in December to try my luck rolling these stars. Added Blessers flitter (Al 400-1000) comp to Ruby red cores in a wok. Very difficult rolling, the aluminum much prefered to stick to the wok than to the stars. After we had rolled 500g of ruby red 3/8 inch cores, it dawned on me that starpol was a no-no on a strontium nitrate based core. But now, what was done was done. *Sigh*. After a week of drying in a warm dry place, they were popped into a hot box for an additional dose of dry heat. Star gun tests (unprimed) were promising. I primed them with a hot perc. primer, no mixed intermediate layers.

Results: Not good. The primer needed to be mixed in with comp in intermediate layering. I loaded (most) of the stars in a true 3" shell. Total shell weight was 500. The lift; 26g of 1F. There was very little room around the shell, not even enough to spike the 10 roll kraft case. Rice hull burst+ 3g of 70/30 fla$h boost. Centered time fuse with a straw, filled with more 1 and 2F.

It was while loading that I found the prime layer could be easily broken from the perc./ al. comp. Nuts! The rest you probably can guess.

The shell lifted beautifully, 2.5 seconds of rise to a perfect (rising) apogee. A healthy, robust burst with a bright core, a fair amount of twinklers, and about 8 or so red stars mostly concentrated to the bottom of the break.

It is assumed that most of the prime shattered off of the (Blessers) flitter layer. A hundred or so stars blew blind. Why the twinkle, I dont know. Wish I did know.

How did your stars turn out??

[Jerronimo]

Those Bleser white flitter stars were exellent, nice bright silver tails.
I also tried the passfire ruby red and emerald green, the results were disapointing, they burnt way to slow and had poor light output.
Maybe it was the magnalium I used, it was quite coarse even after putting it in a coffeegrinder.
I will try some magnesium green end red stars in the future.

The blue and purple chlorate stars (own formula) were superb, very nice colour good burnrate and ignition.
Maybe I will post the formulas in the starformulas tread.