SAS Guide: Making Your Own Fireworks!
Welcome to another in Junkheap's ever popular how-to series, the SAS Guide.
Making your own fireworks is quite a simple process, and blowing your hands off is simpler still, so this article should be appropriate for everyone from beginners to twats.
To start, you'll need some black powder.
- 15 parts charcoal
- 10 parts sulphur
- 75 parts potassium nitrate
Grind each down seperately into a fine powder, and mix the ingredients with a little water until they're doughy. Press together. Leave to dry and grind down again.
To create a bright shower of sparks, mix about 50 parts potassium nitrate, 8 parts sulpher, 8 parts charcoal, 35 parts iron or steel powder and 8 parts sugar with a little water. Form into pea-sized balls, and leave to dry. Try silverprint.co.uk for colour chemicals. (sodium for yellow, strontium for red, calcium for green, barium chloride for orange.)
Now take a cardboard tube and make the top fifth into a seperate compartment filled with black powder for a "bursting charge". Insert the cylinder through the centre of another, larger tube, and force a piece of fuse wire through the inner tube into the black powder. Fill the other shell with black powder and the pea sized colour balls you made.
To launch, fill a short steel pipe with a "lifting charge" of more black powder, attach a fuse and fasten to the base. When the fuse on the pipe is lit, the black powder explodes sending the firework skyward and lighting the fuse in the inner tube. Once it reaches the bursting charge the firework explodes.
Oooooh. Aaaahhh.
Stolen from a popular UK men's magazine