Beach Shoot #19 - 5 Shot Blue and Glitter Candle
Date: 2004-01-16
Description
A spiral wrapped tube from the core of a fax paper roll made itself available for my experiments. On checking its ID (10 mm), it was found to be a good match for a batch of 8 mm pumped KP organic blue stars, who's priming layer made them a sliding fit.
Some -20+40 mesh pulverone was used for the lifts, more being used for the upper shots than the lower ones, in a square-law manner, attempting to make up for the difference in tube length each lift would experence.
Two 8 mm pumped D1 glitter stars were placed between the three blue shots to break them up and make it a little more interesting than just shooting 5 blue stars in a row. As there were unprimed they were perfect 8 mm OD cylinders and not a good match to the tube. A little extra pulverone was dumped in around them in an attempt to compensate for this. The blue stars also had a smaller quantity of pulverone around and above them to passfire as well as clear the tube of any residual delay composition or dross.
The delay was 80% meal, 10% -325 mesh spherical Aluminium and 10% Aluminium firefly flitters. The metals role more as a phlegmatizer than to add effect.
Some blackmatch and meal-NC paste priming was used to fuse the device, with a small amount of masking tape for expedient nosing. A bamboo kebab stick was hot-melt glued in place as a stake.
Comments
Worked pretty well!
Compared to my previous candles, this one was great. All five shots lifted well, especially the last 4, the first was a bit weak, having less than 1" of mortar length.
The delay composition is perhaps a little slow, but seemed to burn quite well. The tube was fairly badly damaged by its high burning temperature, but did not fail. It was a poor quality tube, so this is perhaps not suprising.
The glitter stars were not lifted as well as the tighter fitting blue stars. This is simply a geometry problem and easily fixed. The last two blue lifts went to near equal height (and a long way up too, for a fairly quiet lift), so the lift tuning is pretty close and can be cleaned up once better fitting stars are tested. The camera didn't pan-up on the last blue lift unfortunately. In many ways I like the crescendo-like performance of a candle with equal charges in each shot, so does my audience, so I may leave the lifts untuned.
Perhaps alternating red and blue stars next time? Maybe some purples? I should make up a batch of those Barium Carbonate greens I've been working on and try them too. The glitter does have a certian charm, but with closer spaced lifts it might not be completely extingished before the next effect lifts.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 3.948 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 79.048 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 114.568 kbytes |