26 June 2007 - 04:50 PM
NC is Not a high explosive at all, and flash paper is found at any magicians or special effects shop and may be purchased by anyone over 18.
25 January 2007 - 12:58 AM
Mumbles
Are you looking for single materials or BP? For single materials, I'd suggest something along the lines of an air or hammer mill, both are pretty costly. For something like BP, I'm not really sure. Mortar and pestle maybe. I've heard good BP can be made from a mortar and pestle in 5-10 minutes, but it is limited by batch size. They have automatic mortars and pestles. I am sure there is some sort of lab grinder that would be efficient and acceptable for BP.
Skarphedin
Do you use a real ball mill or a rock tumbler? I have a small ballmill built with support from L. Sponenburghs book. 150 gr fast BP mill dust is ready in 3 hours, charcoal stars in 15-60 minutes depending on the effect I want. Potassium nitrate and charcoal is reduced to very fine dust in 30 minutes. I'm pretty happy with that performance.
To save time you can build a larger mill with space for two jars at the same time. Also by increasing the diameter of the mill jars you increase efficiency. Just scale your mill to the desired capacity.
Some also use various electrical or hand operated grinders to grind single chemicals. I use a small almond grinder to grind charoal used for spark effects. Charcoal used for BP is just tossed in chunks in the mill.
If you plan your pyrotechnical activities, milling time is not that problematic. Many very time consuming activities easily fills the time until the mill is done, like ramming hummers!
and this is why milling the BP materials is a boring thing for most of us. 
Mortartube
Make sure that your chemicals are fairly fine anyway before they go into the ball mill. A coffee grinder is ideal and sieve them before they go in. This will cut down the milling time.
phildunford
I'm in the process of building an experimental orbital ball mill.
These are used in chem labs and are much faster than conventional ball mills and grind very fine.
They are however VERY expensive to buy, hence my attempt at construction.
I've never heard of a pyro using one but I'm pretty sure they would work well..
example of one here but no prices - and yes they do come in various sizes...
pyrotrev
When I was working in soil science we had a disc mill that was frighteningly efficient (think 75g of ROCK to 200 mesh in minutes). Imagine a short large diameter ball mill jar made of something hard (carbide or alumina) with a cylindrical lump of the same material maybe 1/2 the inside diameter (=500g) rattling around inside, the whole thing being shaken in a rotary direction at 3,000 rpm. Not sure I'd want to put anything more than single chems in one though!
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