Balcony Shoot #50 - 12.5 mm Titanium Micro-Mine
Date: 2004-11-14
Description
A very simple mine-like device. A 12.5 mm ID spiral tube, 40 mm long, plugged at the bottom with a paper plug and hot-melt glue. An e-match was carefully positioned before the plug and hot-melt glue, with its leads passing to one side of the plug and through the glue to make a gas-tight seal and robust lead restraint.
Two pinches of benzolift were used as propellant, just enough to cover the match head. Above which was placed a thin piece of tissue paper and a pinch of spherical Titanium mixed with a little blackpowder meal.
Finally another end-plug was pushed into the top until it just contacted the Titanium/meal mix.
I added a bamboo spike to hold it in place for testing.
Comments
Worked pretty well.
Considering its size the effect was quite OK, with a nice puff of smoke (which made a rolling mushroom cloud effect) and many bright-white sparks which shot to about 2 metres.
More containment (ie glue the top plug in) would probably give a bit more height and a "crack" rather than a "puft" sound. Micro stars, either glitter or colours would be interesting, as would crackle.
The electrical initiation makes it a relatively safe 'special effect' style device. I might film one against a matte background without the Ti just for the rolling smoke effect.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Video | video/x-msvideo | 431.584 kbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 49.302 kbytes |
| Post-Mortem Picture | image/jpeg | 58.647 kbytes |