Remote Test Site Shoot #2 - Purple Crossettes
Date: 2004-03-19
Description
I recently got some tooling from Wolter Pyro Tools including a 3/4" crossette pump. I decided to try some ambitious coloured crossettes first, using KP Purple. The tooling is excellent and I highly recommend it. I slightly over-moistened the composition which caused some sticking to the pin, but a dip in graphite before pumping cured that.
I made several with different breaks, one with Benzolift, one with Benzoate Whistle, and two with 7/3 Flash. The end disks were punched from chipboard using a 3/4" wad punch and glued in place using hot-melt. Instead of pasting in the comets I wrapped two turns of masking tape around them.
The exposed end was primed well and a cross scratched into it to aid ignition. I rolled a custom 22 mm mortar for testing them, I didn't want one shreading a good mortar.
Comments
Royally sucked.
They simply would not take fire in the mortar. The prime burnt off. The whistle broken one was lost in the dark when it was blown blind, so a piece of visco was taped to the benzolift one and it was ignited on the ground to assess the burn rate.
The KP Purple composition is *very* bright, but quite hard to ignite and slow burning. I feel it would make excellent microstars, especially for small insert shells and fountians. A good prime will need to be used though. I think I'll break up the crossettes to make micro stars to save wasting the batch.
They didn't break very well, even with 7/3 Flash. The masking tape seemed to contain the pieces. Don't bother with the long downloads, the videos aren't very interesting.
I'll probably make some D1 Glitter or Chrysanthemum #6 crossettes instead of colour ones until I get them working properly.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Benzolift Broken Test | video/x-msvideo | 2.953 Mbytes |
| Flash Broken Test | video/x-msvideo | 9.107 Mbytes |
| Crossettes Before Drying | image/jpeg | 64.691 kbytes |
| Crossettes Ready To Test | image/jpeg | 49.511 kbytes |