Hey all... I havn't been on all that much this year... things have been busy, and I also have been messing with a few other things. Let me wander a bit and then connect it all to cannons. Please bear with me.
First thing, I got into antique lanterns. I am surounded by them. I even built this and planted it in my front yard. It is an 1890-ish kerosene street lamp.
I have also been playing with pyro stuff a bit. Learned alot. Made my own black powder and everything. It is a bit of a hastle, but a learning experience worth trying.
Anyway, lanterns use wick. Wick comes in a variety of sizes and is made in a variety of materials. It is designed to "suck up liquids". We make slowmatch by soaking cores of various types in KNO3 solution, right? I played with some lantern wick and discovered it makes awesome slowmatch. I found a wholesale source of it in long lengths as well.
Check out
http://www.wickstore.com/roundoilwick.html . I have tried their #603, #804, CRKnit 1-4, CRKnit 7-16, CRKnit 1-2. It all works awesome as slowmatch. The thicker sizes burn slower and hotter. I have settled on the CRKnit 7-16 myself, as it fits thru the 1/2 inch copper tubing that I made my linsock head out of. It won't easliy slide thru a complicated 1/2 inch tubing assembly, but is will make it easily thru a few inches of it with a "Tee" fitting in the middle. They sell sample packs if one wants to play with different sizes. I found that soaking the stuff in an 16 parts water to 1 part "Grants Stump Remover" by volume solution for 12 hours or so yield a 7/16 inch cord that burns less than a foot an hour. I add food coloring to my solution to make it easier to tell how good a job I did. Unlike typical cotton rope, the saturation of solution is very uniform, even after drying.
Some much for talking about street lamps, on to what I learned playing with pyro stuff....
Like cannon people, pyro people use quickmatch. They use lots of it. They use long lengths of it, and reliablity is really important.
In the past, I have tried really hard to get black powder slurry to soak into the center of cotton string. It doesn't want to go. It just coats the outside, no matter how hard I try. What the pyro people often do is "unwind" the strands with an electric drill, coat all the strands in an unwound state, wind it backup a little, reocoat to build up a thick coating, and the result is a heavily saturated quickmatch.
I also found out something else. I had noticed that the quality of my quickmatch was deteriorating. It just wasn't working as well as it did when I started making the stuff. I had been using the same container of black powder slurry for quite a while. There was still stuff in there, so I kept using it.
What I did not know was that, out of the three ingredients that make up black powder, only KNO3 is really water soluable The rest are in the slurry but not desolved in the water. The first batches of quickmatch no doubt had quite a bit of KNO3 soaked into the cotton string. Subsequent batches had less and less KNO3, as it had left the slurry. All that was left was sulpher and Charcoal, no oxidizer. So, if your match starts working poorly, dump your slurry and make up a new batch. Don't forget to add 10% dextrin to the BP slurry.
You can improve on the quality of the match, as well as extend the usefullness of your BP slurry by first running the cotton string thru the same solution that you make slowmatch with. It will partly to mostly saturate the core of the cotton string with KNO3. This reduced the amount of KNO3 leatching from the BP slurry. It also does make a better quickmatch in general as there is a bit extra oxidizer deep in the core of the string.
String - The more strands the better. I found a source of very fine 3-strand cotton string. I wind up putting 4 lengths of it togther to make 1/8 inch quickmatch. That adds of to 12 strands of heavily saturated string... really hot. If anyone wants to use what I did, they can call John Reilly at 314-707-4353 or email him at strbeam@sbcglobal.net . He sells it to the pyro trade, so you don't have to be evasive about what you are up to when you call him. Shipping may vary, but I bought two rolls for $30 shipping included from him. Each roll has over 12,000 feet of three ply string on it. I think I am all set with cotton string for a while ;-)
Nitrocellous lacquer ("NC Lacquer)- a "paint" of sorts. a highly flamable paint. I'll get to the point in a minute. It can be made in different ways, but the easiest way to make it is to desolve a single base smokeless powder in acetone. Make a fairly saturated solution. It takes a couple days to fully desolve. When it is done, it has the consistancy of maple syrup. When looking for single based smokeless powder, look at IMR brand, and don't bother with anything made by Hercules. Hercules is ALL double based powder. Most (but not all) IMR powder is single based.
What can you do with "NC Laquer" you ask? Have you ever tried forever to get a piece of cannon fuse to light with slowmatch? Sometimes it just doesn't want to light. Take your cannon fuse, dunk the "start" end into some NC laquer, and then immediately dunk it into 2 or 3 or 4F BP. It will dry in less than a minute, and your will habe a blob of bp on the end of the cannon fuse that will take fire super easily. You can put a bit of it on the other end as well to improve what happens as the fuse passes the flame to the charge. I know I have once in a while not seated an aluminum foil wraped charge correctly, and had a misfire. A blob of BP on the business and of a cannon fuse (or quickmatch for that matter) will often burn right thru the foil bag.
Enough rambling for now... gotta go out and light something.
Rick
