Paper casings and Homemade fuses

[BaconPie]

WARNING: Noob thread. A bit about me: I've not got much to offer but i'm willing to learn. Bought my own Potassium Nitrate and visco fuse a few days ago; its in the mail. I've made BP before and watched a friend make some paper casings with cotton covered in BP 'fuses' but i've never made any myself. Intending to start a-new with a smoke bomb. :cool:

Anyway that's not the purpose of this thread. Now, unless i'm missing something, i've not seen any threads on making paper casings or, dare I say, homemade fuses. :eek: Anyone care to help me fold my own paper casings or at least point my in the right direction?

Also, homemade fuses. I'm a bit of a ghetto rigger and like to make my own stuff. Sure I don't mind buying some, i've got some in the post, but I was googling around and found one on melting match heads with burning acetone. Tried that and the results where poor at best; though I only used a really small amount. Are there any homemade fuses that are worth the trouble or is it just best to buy the stuff?

Cheers.

[asilentbob]

We haven't got the informational links thread back up quite yet...
http://www.vk2zay.net/article/18
^Some info on various home made fuses.

Personally when I make blackmatch I just dunk a loop of cotton yarn (craft stores, kinda hard to find sometimes, nice and fluffy so you can work the slurry in between the fibers) in thick BP/dextrin/water/isopropyl alcohol slurry and work the black powder into the yarn by hand, then slowly pull the yarn through my fist to wipe off excess slurry and wrap it around a couple sticks in the yard. Let it dry, then cut it into 3ft sections or so and store them in a paper poster tube. Using multiple thin strings should make a more reliable fuse. If you flex it by hand alot some of the BP will flake off, but its generally not much of a problem. A slight improvement is to impregnate the string with KNO3 solution and dry it first, THEN make black match with it. Your mileage may vary.

There is a method that I learned at PGI that uses cheap toilet paper, BP meal, and felt fabric to make generally slow reliable fuses... BUT I'm too busy with finals right now to try to make a video of it.

I used to hand roll salute casings, but I haven't needed to do so again in a long time as I have pretty much moved on to just making spherical aerial shells.

However, what I did basically was buy a roll of craft paper from some hobby store, then unroll a couple inches of the craft, and using a ruler and box cutter cut off a long strip of however many inches wide. Then I'd get wooden dowl rod of whatever size and attach with tape some wax paper around the area I'd be rolling the paper strip on top of. Then you start rolling without glue until you have made about 1 and 1/4 complete rotaion of the dowl rod. Then I'd put a line of wood glue down, roll over it, then kinda scribble glue a few more inches down the paper, and slowly start rolling it up trying to get the paper wrapped on the dowl as tight as I could without breaking the paper. As you roll alot of the glue will just be pushed forward so you really don't end up using that much glue, just a bit when you start. When you are finished rolling up the tube the ends will be ugly, but it generally doesn't matter for pyro use. carefully push the tube off the dowl rod (without it telescoping) and set it aside to dry. Repeat. After they are dry you can put them back on the dowl rod and cut off the ugly part to make the ends look better, and it will give you a good picture of how even the layer are wrapped and if there are any gaps from air or such.

You could use all sorts of glues. Personally I want to try fiberglass resin some day. Oh and I thin my wood glue with a bit of some kind of alcohol... I think isopropyl... but can't really remember. Probably doesn't make much difference.

[Vineman]

Bob needs to stop being so damn useful.

What I used to do for casings was to get a brown paper bag and just cut it into strips, spread some glue and then roll it tightly around a cheap dowel or whatever.

Polumna's are quite effective as well. Rat_Bastard has a great article on them at http://66.117.45.201/rat/devices/polumna.html

[BaconPie]

Rat_Bastard has a great article on them at http://66.117.45.201/rat/devices/polumna.html

A-ha that's the one my friend used. I'll try the wooden dowel one though, what do you do with the ends? Just crumple it up and tape?

[Vineman]

A-ha that's the one my friend used. I'll try the wooden dowel one though, what do you do with the ends? Just crumple it up and tape?

http://66.117.45.201/rat/casings&endplugs/endplug.html

[BaconPie]

http://66.117.45.201/rat/casings&endplugs/endplug.html

:cool:

[InspiredByMe]

Damn asb you post to much.

Going off of the toilet paper rolled fuse, it works much better if you use tinfoil and black powder. It is quite fast this way but I don't know about safe. If you want fast you should look into quickmatch.

As for glue for the paper cases, wheat paste works very well. In Geroge Weingart's Pyrotechnics a very good method is described. I'm lazy to post the whole thing but I saved this post from pyrosociety UK forums:

A good, homemade glue that will make strong casings is made by adding 4 1/2
cups of flour to 3 cups of boiling water and then adding 1/8 ounce of alum
(aluminum potassium sulfate). Stir this combination until it is consistent in
blend. When it's cooled, it's ready to use. The flour is the actual glue. The
alum helps fireproof the mess and helps act as a preservative. This is
important, as wet flour will eventually spoil, and so this mess has to be
used up fairly quickly. Don't count on saving it for more than a couple of
days.

But if spoilage is a real problem, can we let the flour spoil BEFORE we make
the glue? This is not as silly a question as it sounds. By doing this, we
make a slop that can be kept a month or so, if it's also kept in a reasonably
cool, dark place. Just don't make it on a full stomach.

Pour anywhere from a few cups to a few bucketfulls of flour into a container
large enough to cover it with a good layer of water but still be only a third
full. How much water you use doesn't matter too much right now, as most of it
will be poured out later. Just make sure that you're making a batter, instead
of a dough. Stir it up good, but don't worry too much about little lumps.
That will be corrected later.

Now for the revolting part. Let the stuff sit for 2-3 days in a warm (90
degrees F) place and check it after then. If it hasn't begun fermenting by
then, drop in a few pinches of instant yeast. When the fermentation is finished
and there are no more bubbles forming, the flour will have settled as a gooey
layer at the bottom of a pool of revolting brownish liquid. Get rid of the
brown slop and note how much batter is resting in the bottom of the container.
Boil enough water so as to have a volume that's twice the size of the batter,
and pour it in slowly, stirring the flour briskly. It'll start out being easy
to stir, but will get thick in a hurry. If you're only making a few cups at a
time, it won't be heavy enough to hold still while you're trying to stir it, so
you might want to have the container clamped down solid.

If you did it all right, you should have a batch of clear, smooth paste that's
plenty sticky and fine for sticking your casings together. Since it's already a
spoiled batch of flour, it can't go bad a second time and needs no
preservatives.

[asilentbob]

I don't know about the aluminum foil thing, I imagine its similar... But I'd be wary of it quick-matching on you. That shouldn't happen with the tissue paper fuse since there are small holes everywhere, no real confinement of the gasses.

[nuclearrabbit]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwyDGa7ohz0
That's what to expect from Al foil fuses. Homemade casings can be wound around a dowel or something or the polumna, both covered very well in this thread.