al93535

What about pyro dust accumulating in the motor? Or a spark being produced when you make a connection to the battery?

Japanese hemi's are almost always paper, at least the ones I have seen. The hemishperes are simply perfect! They do not warp into football shapes, they are a bit thicker with stronger paper, and they meet together with zero gap. They are a luxury to use! On 8" plus shells they come with a plastic ring to keep the two hemis together and keep them nice!

What you are talking about are the plastic shells from gamon plasticos like mumbles said. A bottom hemi, then a top hemi that has a removeable top section to aid in filling the shell all the way up then putting the cap on. This eliminates the step of slapping the two hemi's together. A very nice construction method. These shells also come with a molded snap on plastic lift cup. There are also nesting sets of shells out there, and those are very very nice!

Anyways other then making a purchase from the manufacturer your best bet is here: http://www.pyro-pro.com/ email him if you dont see what you want.

What size are you looking for? and how many?

I don't know. Personally I would never make a magnesium fueled star and bind it with a water activated binder! Especially without coated mag! Parlon and solvent, and Nitrocellulose lacquer are two that would be fine. Just make sure the solvents are dry!

Even if you had success with the batch, please change it to a non-aqueous binding system. You could even leave the dex in for delay if you wanted....

Usually a small batch that is dried really fast won't show any dangers. If you scale up that batch, or the sun isnt out and you cant dry it fast enough, it could be very disastrous!
Anyways, be safe!

Dichromate and sulfur huh? Interesting, I might have to try that out.

You can add magnesium carbonate to cool the composition as well. But this had better be a stand alone firework, as any other stars/effects are going to vastly outshine these!

We make quite nice blues at work and use mgal in them. Of course when the blues are up against reds and greens at 12% to 14% mgal, tey have to have some metal content!

Dichromate does catalyse the decomposition of perchlorate. I do not see how it would make a blue any more vivid, in fact I would guess that the increase in burn speed would make the star hotter and therefore wash out the blue!

In my opinion there is way to much PVC in that formula. You can drop the sulfur and the potassium nitrate too.

If I were to make an organic blue star I would use something like:

Potassium perchlorate 63
Black copper oxide 10
Saran resin 10
red gum 4
Hexamine 9
Dextrin 4

Of course you can also use Ammonium perchlorate to make an excellent blue star but they do burn slowly!

On another note, I would use dichromate for only one reason, to protect magnesium from being attacked by ammonium perchlorate! It is the only really useable coating for Mg and NH4ClO4. Its too toxic for its mundane protection on anything else.