The driver was the ground spinner who's fuse got drenched on the Queenscliff Beach Shoot #4. The driver was refused with a stick of narrow blackmatch held in place with a small dob of meal-NC paste.
The driver case: 5 mm ID, 10 mm OD, 55 mm long. Calculator paper tape pasted with PVA glue. End plugs of paper wadding and hot-melt glue. 2.5 mm nozzle in side of case, no fire proofing at all.
I reused the pivot and counter balance cardboard from the Zn Pinwheel Driver Test, but cut it down a little to reduce the weight. The result was still very unbalanced.
The composition was the last few dregs of the Zn Pinwheel Driver composition that wasn't used in making up quickmatch.
Spun quite well.
The display was pretty unimpressive, the Zn Driver composition doesn't make many sparks at all, so the disk of fire was pretty thin. It spun very fast though, in fact it is spinning counter-clockwise in the video but appears to be turning the other way because of sampling effects. It could definately burn longer and with a more exciting effect. The core-burning rocket fuel should make a respectable effect especially with added flitters for fireflys.
The case took the abuse much better than expected. The hole widening did not seem to cause any problems at all. If I source some waterglass I've have a go fireproofing the hole in future, or perhaps using the clay nozzle idea, but I'll need to make up some tooling to try that.
The pivot pin actually pulled out of the timber and the device landed in the corner of the balcony (bottom left of the video) where is span on the ground for the remainer of the propellant. The pin was still through the axle when I recovered it.
I'll definately have to make myself up a new pivot system, with ball bearings and a wing-nut with washers retaining system, similar to the one described on passfire.
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Burn Video | video/x-msvideo | 759.164 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 23.758 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 35.367 kbytes |