When to Fuse/Poke?

[markcockrell]

Hey all!

I've received my fireworks order for the 4th, and I have everything I need to start fusing/poking/poking everything. My question is this: Can this be done too soon? I live in north Georgia, where it's humid basically all the time, but the summer months are even more so. If I unwrap everything now and spend the next several weeks getting things done an hour or two at a time, will the humidity dampen my fuses and make misfires more likely? I've got an Ignite system and will be using MJG initiators with it, but there will still be a number of effects that I need to combine with various lengths of fuse.

Any advice from those who've walked this road before? Thanks in advance.

[PyroFL]

First, to help in the future start writing your times down of how long each thing has taken to do each job and the number of items your working on.

This way in the future you will have a very good idea of man hours to prep and setup time.

As for the humidity we live in Florida so we fight it all the time too but I also have a temperature and humidity control garage just for my firework storage per my HOA request AKA melt down.

I know 2 pyros that live in central Florida that use containers on there properties with no control and they get there fireworks January/February timeframe as I do and they never have problems.

So I think you’re fine.

What I have notice and others have too is for non-controlled garages, that mortars can’t really be kept until the next year.

As for when to start depends, how much help do you have and how much product do you have?

For myself we just finished our 6 cases of mortars last week as that seems to take a lot of time. We will start this year on June 12th with our 164 cakes and 436 single shots we’re doing this year and know we will be done the week before the 4th, but also we have 10 pyros

[KDirk]

I share the concern over the effect of humidity on product and fusing, as I'm in St Louis, MO where we typically have bad humidity (often 90%+ by early to mid June most years). That said, we have been unseasonably cool and rainy here for mid-late spring (have had only a few days in May where we got over 80° yet, and even with all the rain, the cool temps have made it feel less humid). Maybe we get lucky and that pattern holds.

I'm also concerned about poking/installing igniters too far in advance, more for safety than any other reason. I setup several racks of poked/MJG style igniters in mortars about a week in advance last year, and was nervous about storing them until shoot day. I do still have some clip (nichrome wire) igniters to use up, and tend to use those where timing isn't critical. These worry me less as they seem unlikely to somehow light themselves.

I will say give yourself more time than you think you need, it never goes as quickly as you envision unless you are an experienced old pro at this (and I'm not, yet). Make a detailed cue list. I made up a form in excel I used to list module type, channel(s) assigned, what was in each cue, general physical location on the shoot field, and where in the show it was to be fired (manually shooting in real time to a music play list, using Cobra hardware).

The middle part of the show consisted largely of gang fused mortars in large racks (50 tubes each, fused in groups of 10) so I could press a button and launch 10 mortars at a time in fairly rapid sequence to keep up the sky filled most of the time. Did similar at the finale, only with faster pacing and more shot at once. This made more economical use of my limited number of cues, and saved me from quite as much button pressing, at the expense of being able to more precisely time some things. Cakes were generally 1:1 on a cue, or 2:1 if I had the spaced apart for a more panoramic effect. I don't think anyone watching noticed or cared if it wasn't all tightly synced to the music, to be honest.

Also give yourself plenty of prep time to unpack all retail 1.4 mortars. There is a lot of packing material to undo and discard, and I always remove the plastic end caps from them before loading into tubes so the plastic doesn't end up everywhere at the shoot sight, complicating cleanup. I had ~400 mortars and it took several evenings working alone to get all those ready to go.

[Salutecake]

I don't know how much help this is but when I poke, I like to tape with Dave's magic tape, and somewhere on this site is a video. I just make sure the poke hole is covered with the tape. That's about the best you can do.

[BMoore]

Most visco fuse these days is lacquered to resist moisture. The bigger concern might be if you are taping your connections will the tape survive. Dave's magic tape (U-Haul Tape) seems to resist humidity very well. Whenever I want to test a new batch of fuse, I make a few test connections. Connect up a couple short sections of your fuse and let them sit for a few weeks and then light them and see how they behave. To replicate high humidity, put them in your bathroom where you take hot showers or even give them a fine spritz of water and see how well they perform. It might not be a real world test, but could make you sleep better at night.