When experimenting with homemade pyrotechnics, things go wrong, and you don't want to be
too close if your composition explodes. I need some sort of a pyrotechnic time-delay, so for this
project I'm using items from around the house, to make a simple form of a slow burning fuse.
If you've seen my videos on making rocket fuel and smoke flares, you'll probably recognize
these ingredients. This time I'm mixing up 36 grams of my stump remover with 24 grams
of white table sugar. This gives me a 60 gram composition that needs to be shaken up vigorously.
I have a pre-heated frying pan set at medium heat, so that when I add 1/3 cup of water,
it boils instantly. At this point, I'll slowly sprinkle in the 60g mixture because I want
this all to dissolve. I can stir that in with a spatula and because the water is so hot,
it dissolves completely. That'll need to sit for a minute, to heat up and let the water
boil out, so it's a good time to prepare my cord. This is 100% cotton yarn, and I'm gonna
be using about 12 feet of it. Ok, the water has boiled down to the point where the slurry
is getting very frothy which means this solution is super saturated. It's time to add the yarn
into the mix to soak up the chemicals. As the last bit of water continues to evaporate
out, it's important that every bit of yarn is absorbing an equal amount of the solution.
Holding onto one end will help prevent the yarn from knotting up when I pull it out.
This gets transferred onto a cookie sheet using a pattern resembling a sine wave, and
with about 6 turns on each side, the yarn is evenly spaced and fits perfectly. Now this
goes into an oven set to 300ºC for about 20 minutes. And while the cord is still hot,
I can nudge it slightly to prevent it from sticking to the pan when it cools later on.
Alright, the time is up and this cord has a slightly golden tinge to it, and that's
a good sign, so I'll leave it out to cool for about 5-10 minutes. When the cord has
fully cooled, you can see it's become stiff and retains the shape from when it was baked.
Now I can just cut these strands at the base of the turns, using some scissors, and I've
got a nice piece of fuse cord ready to go. The cord is easy to cut, and a few of these
strands will get cut down smaller to be used in a batch of smoke flares I made in another
project. Look for how I built those in a different video. Ok, testing out the fuse, the first
thing I notice is it lights off really quickly, and continues a steady and progressive burn.
Even with a little breeze, it's still got a nice flame shooting off the back, and seems
to burn steady at about 3 seconds per inch. Sweet. I tried making different fuses, this
time soaking a coffee filter in the solution and laying it out for baking. I also tried
soaking some paper towel, then twisting pieces of it into shorter but thicker fuses. After
they were baked, they were very dry, and very rigid. I cut a strip of the coffee filter
first, and tested it with a rock on top, to see if it would fizzle out when it lost contact
with the open air. Surprisingly, it continued to burn on underneath the rock, and kept on
burning right out the other side. One of the paper towel fuses was lit, but maybe twisting
it wasn't such a good idea, because when the pressure built inside, it was gone in an instant.
I tried another one, and got pretty much the same result. When this one was lit without
anything holding it down, it went airborne So as far as consistency, reliability and
aesthetics go, I'm pretty happy with the results using the yarn. Well there's how I made some
cheap, but functional, slow burning fuses with things around the house. If you liked
this project, perhaps you'll like some of my others. Check them out at www.thekingofrandom.com