30 replies to this topic

[digger]

That is the nice thing about amateur pyrotechnics you can make prototypes that would cost many thousands to develop in the commercial world,
we do it all for very little cost and just for fun.

Yep I agree completely. That is why Wayne is heading up the legislation committee to ensure that the amateur can do it all in a legal framework.

[Mumbles]

It seems the solvent colors are typically quite useful. I've used Solvent Red 9 with success.

[Farnet]

Digger / Vic,

I think my wife said exactly what I was thinking as I read out you replies..... erm possible moneymaking potential as there seems to be a good gap in the market but..... NO!!! If I had a spare £30k there are lots more things i'd use the cash for.

Saying that.... it's a damn good 'DRAGONS DEN' style possibility.

[digger]

Digger / Vic,

I think my wife said exactly what I was thinking as I read out you replies..... erm possible moneymaking potential as there seems to be a good gap in the market but..... NO!!! If I had a spare £30k there are lots more things i'd use the cash for.

Saying that.... it's a damn good 'DRAGONS DEN' style possibility.

You may be able to do it more cheaply, but you would have to fall pretty lucky and get all of your stores on the cheap somewhere and get nearly free use of some land. Either way you would have to be pretty dedicated (I know I am going through it at the moment, and there is no guarantee it will work out).

My business partner makes coloured smokes for the paint ball industry. His point of view on smoke devices is that they are just a bit of a necessary evil to fill in time. It is dirty hard work for very little money. What you have to think about is all of the cuts everyone takes on the way to getting them into a paintball venue. The venue owner will want to sell all of the smokes to the people on site and probably won't want people bringing their own (he will make the most money). I believe the trade price for a coloured smoke is about £1 or less so if you add up all of the costs for the item there is very little profit in it. That is unless you have a massive very expensive automated press (quoted to me at 250K + 50K building) chunking out 400 smokes per pressing otherwise it is a soul destroying job.

Just my 2p, possible but would take some dedication and $ to say the least to make any real money.

[Farnet]

Thanks Digger, I will add the info to Keystone as they are looking at contacting someone to provide a service from what I can gather.

RIGHT ......... Blue Smoke, second attempt.....



Little bit slow to take effect, but the result is a marked improvement after doing all that was recommended..

[Mortartube]

Seems a lot better. You may get a faster smoke production if you deepen and widen the core in the comp a bit.

Well done, a nice blue.

Edited by Mortartube, 09 June 2011 - 04:54 PM.

[Farnet]

I was having problems making a large core as the formula is so light and powdery, what do you recommend to harden the mix, I remember that you can heat the saltpetre and sugar mix to make a solid lump, I'm not so sure that doing that with a chlorate base would be a good idea.

Open to suggestions.....

Yellow tomorrow.

Also generally mixing blue with yellow gives you green, but would that be the case with smoke dyes?

[digger]

Also generally mixing blue with yellow gives you green, but would that be the case with smoke dyes?

Yep

Mix colours for what ever colour you want. Black is the only hard colour!

[whoof]

Yep

Mix colours for what ever colour you want. Black is the only hard colour!

Dunno about that , recent experiments have given now't but black, smelly too, PM explains.

[Farnet]

Right 3rd (Yellow) and 4th (Green) tests have been completed, think I have cracked it now.

Then powder is so fine I couldn't find a way of compressing it enough to make a stable central void, so I improvised and used a long rectangular piece of polystyrene (please don't go on about climate change etc.....it worked) to become the void once the device is activated.

The green had additional mod of 1 gram of BP meal mixed into the top layer to creat a faster and stronger burn.... so say it worked....well watch..



and lastly (for now... might try purple and orange tomorrow), green



it's a far cry from the red at the beginning, but I can see the real appeal of coloured smoke when you get it right.... now to try the old Astra version of the traffic lights... that is going to be difficult

Farnet

[dave]

The green had additional mod of 1 gram of BP meal mixed into the top layer to creat a faster and stronger burn.... so say it worked....well watch..

Farnet
[/quote]

hi,
technically its not such a good idea to mix meal bp, which contains sulpur with chlorate mixtures.

having said that some of the older miitary smokes did use chlorate/sulphur instead of chlorate/sugar but i think there was a big move to get rid of the sulphur altogether,
and now its chlorate/sugar all the way.

the green dye is usually mixed with a bit of yellow (~5-10%) in some formulations to get a better hue colour in the mil. smokes

on a more obscure note Pentaerythritol , has been used in some terethphalic acid compositions (white screening smoke) instead of sugar to reduce toxicity even further.
as you say, coloured smokes are good when they work.

dave

[parabolic]

hope yor neighbours don't have any washing on their lines LOL!

so what were your final compositions? same as first one in red but you just changed the dyes over?

I got some lactose the other day when I was buying some homebrew supplies, yes I'm a fellow homebrewer too! would you believe it they now have to inform police if a stranger purchased it in large amounts because of the use in cutting up illegal substances...I was ok because I go there alot but he now has to keep it round the back, was a bit like buying special meat in Royston Vasey style.

I like the idea of dextrose.

Edited by parabolic, 16 June 2011 - 09:17 AM.

[digger]

The green had additional mod of 1 gram of BP meal mixed into the top layer to creat a faster and stronger burn.... so say it worked....well watch..

Farnet

In fact for manufacture it is illegal under all circumstances to mix sulphur with chlorates. Why not try sulphurless meal?

I got some lactose the other day when I was buying some homebrew supplies, yes I'm a fellow homebrewer too! would you believe it they now have to inform police if a stranger purchased it in large amounts because of the use in cutting up illegal substances...I was ok because I go there alot but he now has to keep it round the back, was a bit like buying special meat in Royston Vasey style.

I like the idea of dextrose.

Yep it has been like that for a long time. Completely ridiculous, I am sure dodgy geezers can manage to do better than lactose.

How hygroscopic is dextrose when compared to lactose? I always thought it sucked in a bit of moisture.

Edited by digger, 16 June 2011 - 03:04 PM.

[Farnet]

Hi Digger,

The green meal was only a test on the green dye to see if the ignition could be speeded up, in fact the green didn't need speeding up at all, as I tried it without the meal later on and it was just as fast; weirdly Red and Blue are very slow to initiate, whereas Yellow is very fast, so the combination to make green seems to have adopted the yellows rapid ignition.

Parabolic, all the dyes used the same formula, I am going to test the blue and red with a slight adaptation soon; as for the Dextrose I got it from HB ingredients online, the people there specialise in distribution to the confectionary industry, and to say the were pleasant and helpful would be an understatement. The original purchase was for use in conjunction with Turbo Yeast, but I find that it produced a wash that had a nasty aftertaste, even after running it through the brita filter 4 or 5 times it was still there, whereas standard sucrose with the triple distilled yeast is a much much purer taste in my opinion, sorry digressing somewhat....

Digger, the initial test with green producted no benificial results so irrespective to your wise words (still on the learning curve, and to be honest when I did it I had a niggling feeling about the introduction of sulphur to a chlorate mix) I wouldn't have been trying it again.

I still have 20kg left of Dextrose in a loose bag and I haven't found any clumping or any signs of hygroscopic activity, and since I did the brewing in January it's had quite a while for potential absorbtion.

Farnet

Edited by Farnet, 16 June 2011 - 05:58 PM.

[Farnet]

Had a bit of a play and tried a Purple to Green strobing smoke, it sort of worked, there was a bit of grey smoke in the process of change, not a clue how to prevent that... if it is even possible..