wow this past weekend was amazing.
meggie came up to state college to spend the weekend with me, and we drove to my grandparents' place in NEPA. their yard had been flooded last week, by the monsoon, so we spent a lot of time picking up large rocks from the yard, cleaning out all the waterlogged stuff from the basement, and shovelling out the garage. but we also got to make a few hundred grams of homemade black powder, which wasn't very good quality, but was enough for the cremoras, which i'll explain in a minute...
i spend roughly $400 on chemical supplies (most of which are for long-term use, not just for July 4, 2006), and almost $600 on actual fireworks (again, a lot of which weren't used on the 4th... this way i have a constant supply, since i can only buy stuff on the day i have a permit to set them off). the fireworks included 8 mortar tubes, and plenty of shells to load into them. we lined up all 8 tubes and chained them together with fast yellow visco fuse, so they'd go off in rapid succession. worked like a charm. the electric firing system i made a couple weeks ago worked very well too, but i found out that the e-matches didn't burn long enough to reliably light my ultra-low-quality black powder.
we also set off a 750-shot saturn missile battery. i had to get that one, because i had talked to the guy who first came up with the idea when i was at the fireworks convention in april. on top of that, we had an "And the Crowd Goes Wild", which is probably my favorite consumer cake (as opposed to the professional display cakes, which you need a federal explosives license for... give me time). problem is, i was so excited and rushed because my parents were leaving, that i set it up 90-degrees off from where it was supposed to be, so rather than the shells sweeping side-to-side, the swept front-to-back. serves my parents right for trying to rush me.
(no, nobody was hurt, it just made it more interesting)
to get the cremoras to work, i needed to find the right ratio between black powder and creamer powder, since most references describe using much higher-grade commercial BP. i also had to get it to work with my firing system. the second task was easy... i just taped the e-match to some of that fast yellow visco, and poured the powder in on top of that. the task of finding the right ratio took a few tries though. the first one we made just kinda burned and fell over. the second and third made very sloppy 10-15 foot fireballs. the fourth, however, was perfect. we used an old mortar tube (usually a bucket is used, but my BP wasn't strong enough to lift the powder with such a wide openning), and about 5 times as much BP as one recipe calls for. ---side note: always be careful when changing recipes like this. kids, don't try this at home. i am, in fact, an untrained amateur.--- we also didn't fill the tube all the way with cremora, as we found that if we did, it was too heavy to be pushed very high. it was a good change, as the fireball was beautifully shaped and climbed a good 20-25 feet. by the way, all of this was done completely LEGALLY. i know, i'm such a geek, but c'mon, if i want to eventually make a living blowing things up, the last thing i need is something on my record about misusing explosives. plus i'm building a good reputation with the local township supervisor and police force, so each year they'll let me expand my experience a bit more.
after the festivities at the lake, we packed up the leftovers and came back to state college for the largest all-volunteer fireworks show in the nation. since i'm one of the volunteers, we had free VIP tickets, and wow was it worth it. i was so mesmerized by the show that i don't even remember most of the songs that were played. by the time the finale was over, my brain had gone numb from all the sensory input, and meggie and i just sorta sat there for a while. no words could describe what we had just seen. "wow" was repeated probably several hundred times over the next couple hours.
there was a break during the show where i settled into some nostalgia. when they played the theme from indiana jones (a favorite movie series of ro, my exgirlfriend), i had to remove my arm from around meggie for a while. but she didn't notice the change. she knows things are still a little weird with ro, and she's not okay with it, but i'm not dating meggie. she knows she's just a very close friend to me right now. i still try to avoid talking about ro around her though, because there's no reason to make her upset.
so now my favorite time of year has once again come and gone, with a lot of ups and only a couple downs... but it is not a bad thing. rather than being saddened by the end of such an awesome weekend, i'm already excited for what next year holds. every year the show at the lake gets bigger, and every year i get more involved in 4th Fest. i'll probably get to be on the choreography team this year, so that'll be awesome, and i'm hoping to have a computer-controlled firing system built by next year for the show at the lake.
anyway, if anybody actually sat here and ready through this entire post, i'm very impressed. leave some comments, ask some questions, cheer me on, tell me i'm crazy, whatever. just please, don't try to mimic me without at least first doing some research of your own. with that said, go blow something up.
-roger_murdock
meggie came up to state college to spend the weekend with me, and we drove to my grandparents' place in NEPA. their yard had been flooded last week, by the monsoon, so we spent a lot of time picking up large rocks from the yard, cleaning out all the waterlogged stuff from the basement, and shovelling out the garage. but we also got to make a few hundred grams of homemade black powder, which wasn't very good quality, but was enough for the cremoras, which i'll explain in a minute...
i spend roughly $400 on chemical supplies (most of which are for long-term use, not just for July 4, 2006), and almost $600 on actual fireworks (again, a lot of which weren't used on the 4th... this way i have a constant supply, since i can only buy stuff on the day i have a permit to set them off). the fireworks included 8 mortar tubes, and plenty of shells to load into them. we lined up all 8 tubes and chained them together with fast yellow visco fuse, so they'd go off in rapid succession. worked like a charm. the electric firing system i made a couple weeks ago worked very well too, but i found out that the e-matches didn't burn long enough to reliably light my ultra-low-quality black powder.
we also set off a 750-shot saturn missile battery. i had to get that one, because i had talked to the guy who first came up with the idea when i was at the fireworks convention in april. on top of that, we had an "And the Crowd Goes Wild", which is probably my favorite consumer cake (as opposed to the professional display cakes, which you need a federal explosives license for... give me time). problem is, i was so excited and rushed because my parents were leaving, that i set it up 90-degrees off from where it was supposed to be, so rather than the shells sweeping side-to-side, the swept front-to-back. serves my parents right for trying to rush me.
(no, nobody was hurt, it just made it more interesting)
to get the cremoras to work, i needed to find the right ratio between black powder and creamer powder, since most references describe using much higher-grade commercial BP. i also had to get it to work with my firing system. the second task was easy... i just taped the e-match to some of that fast yellow visco, and poured the powder in on top of that. the task of finding the right ratio took a few tries though. the first one we made just kinda burned and fell over. the second and third made very sloppy 10-15 foot fireballs. the fourth, however, was perfect. we used an old mortar tube (usually a bucket is used, but my BP wasn't strong enough to lift the powder with such a wide openning), and about 5 times as much BP as one recipe calls for. ---side note: always be careful when changing recipes like this. kids, don't try this at home. i am, in fact, an untrained amateur.--- we also didn't fill the tube all the way with cremora, as we found that if we did, it was too heavy to be pushed very high. it was a good change, as the fireball was beautifully shaped and climbed a good 20-25 feet. by the way, all of this was done completely LEGALLY. i know, i'm such a geek, but c'mon, if i want to eventually make a living blowing things up, the last thing i need is something on my record about misusing explosives. plus i'm building a good reputation with the local township supervisor and police force, so each year they'll let me expand my experience a bit more.
after the festivities at the lake, we packed up the leftovers and came back to state college for the largest all-volunteer fireworks show in the nation. since i'm one of the volunteers, we had free VIP tickets, and wow was it worth it. i was so mesmerized by the show that i don't even remember most of the songs that were played. by the time the finale was over, my brain had gone numb from all the sensory input, and meggie and i just sorta sat there for a while. no words could describe what we had just seen. "wow" was repeated probably several hundred times over the next couple hours.
there was a break during the show where i settled into some nostalgia. when they played the theme from indiana jones (a favorite movie series of ro, my exgirlfriend), i had to remove my arm from around meggie for a while. but she didn't notice the change. she knows things are still a little weird with ro, and she's not okay with it, but i'm not dating meggie. she knows she's just a very close friend to me right now. i still try to avoid talking about ro around her though, because there's no reason to make her upset.
so now my favorite time of year has once again come and gone, with a lot of ups and only a couple downs... but it is not a bad thing. rather than being saddened by the end of such an awesome weekend, i'm already excited for what next year holds. every year the show at the lake gets bigger, and every year i get more involved in 4th Fest. i'll probably get to be on the choreography team this year, so that'll be awesome, and i'm hoping to have a computer-controlled firing system built by next year for the show at the lake.
anyway, if anybody actually sat here and ready through this entire post, i'm very impressed. leave some comments, ask some questions, cheer me on, tell me i'm crazy, whatever. just please, don't try to mimic me without at least first doing some research of your own. with that said, go blow something up.
-roger_murdock