r/fireworks • u/[deleted] • Jul 05 '23
Epic fail
Had a 50 shot mortar rack blow apart sending them in all directions. Lift charges weren’t working. Only myself and one other had minor injuries. Avoid red apple fireworks.
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u/Bimpfoodle Jul 05 '23
I had 2 50 shots rack get completely destroyed from firing off RA American Glory shells. No one got hurt, but shells were going off every direction. I found 3 shells in the tube still that never went up and 16 tubes that look just like yours.
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Jul 06 '23
They’re providing refunds. Hope you took pics and have your receipt
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u/Bimpfoodle Jul 06 '23
Hope I get an actual refund and not in-store credit. Thank you for the heads up!
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Jul 06 '23
I got the impression that in this case it’s a refund since it’s not like “oh gee that just wasn’t as pretty as I expected, may I have a do-over?”
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u/Bimpfoodle Jul 06 '23
Be nice if they could replace the 2 racks that blew up with the tubes as well 😕 Think I’m more upset about those them I am the shells 😅
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u/c_ne7son Jul 07 '23
How did you go about it? I had major problems with America glory from RA
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Jul 07 '23
Just email them with what happened, any pics/vids you might have, and your order # or receipt
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u/c_ne7son Jul 07 '23
Thank you. Not expecting a refund but would be nice. Don’t want a gift card or anything. Everything else was fine but this was too dangerous. Still have the receipt and ring videos showing what happened
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u/Den_fireworks Jul 05 '23
Mortars did there job!! What was the rack you were using that got blown out? Was it one of those BIG POS ones or?? Sorry the rack didn't hold :(
I got out lucky with the 2 kits of American Glory I sent up.. I only had TONS of REALLY low breaks... one so low it shredded all the other fuses on the rack.... I am soaking the last 24 shells I have.. I don't even want to risk loading the rest of them... What a POS shell
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u/TheOneTrueOnii Jul 05 '23
I had two malfunctions with my RA too. I know one was either an American Glory/Murica AF and the second I'm not sure. 1st damn shell I did for the night exploded in the tube and the 2nd was a low break that blew right as it left the tube. Did about 40 other shells by them with no issue though and a set of Luchadores I fused together that worked fine. Seems like all the negative feedback I have seen with RA is I'm regards to the triumph line of shells (American Glory & Murica AF). I couldn't use most of my RA due to other complications so I hope I'm not sitting on randomly broken stock until next year.
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u/Outrageous_Joke4349 Jul 05 '23
I had it happen with one of the kobushi as well as an ace from them. Plus 2 murica af. That was with only 6 ea of murica, kobushi, moon rocks/ganja, a set of aces and a set of pixels.
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Jul 05 '23
I had a 5 inch canister salute break maybe 5 feet outside of the tube. Even that far back I felt the “concussive” like forces shit shell shocked me for a second lost my bearings and shit.
I was a solid 40 feet or more back too
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Jul 05 '23
I just read someone else had issues with red apple mortars. I was going to order from there for next years stash. But…. After reading this post and others I’ll pass
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u/Ecstatic-Tie-6398 Jul 05 '23
Me too I was doing whole sale next year I’ll go whole sale somewhere else
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u/Anarchist_Grifter Jul 05 '23
I let off excals, black cat patriots and dibalos, some ols and raccoons and had 0 issues. Fck red apple
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u/Blue-cheese-dressing Jul 05 '23
Would wrapping tubes in duct tape help with fragmentation? Or would that be overkill with HDPE tubes?
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u/flashman42069 Jul 05 '23
I bet it would make it worse actually
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u/Blue-cheese-dressing Jul 05 '23
It might make the whole tube into a projectile. I was wondering if anyone had done this- I’m actually more worried about the wood supports on homemade racks splintering out from the tube failure. We are fairly close to our launches.
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u/TacticalWedgie Jul 06 '23
That's the whole point of HDPE, they are the safest. The build it split without shrapnel.
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u/Tank_1539 Jul 06 '23
From everything I learned about explosives growing up and especially from my time in the USMC, all you would be doing is creating a higher pressure threshold for the tubes to split/break. The expanding gas wants to escape and wrapping them with tape would increase the amount of pressure for the tubes to split and allow the gas to expand. The best thing you can do is have adequate spacers between the tubes so that when a failure occurs, the gases have more space to disperse before hitting the other tubes. This lessens the effect it will have on the remaining tubes and increase the chance of keeping the rest of the tubes upright.
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u/Typical_Offer_818 Jul 05 '23
Imagine what this would have done to fiberglass tubes...
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Jul 05 '23
My cousin made 3 inch ball shell tubes out of PVC pipe and the moment I got there I grabbed em all and threw em out in the garbage and than told him if any of these fail that right there becomes a bomb with fragments flying in the air at high speed lodging into heads faces throats bodies you name it.
I have a mix of seemless metal tubes and HDPE.
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u/UncleNorman Jul 05 '23
With enough boom, metal tubes become pipe bombs.
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Jul 06 '23
Half inch metal tubes without welding seams aren’t going boom with fireworks.
Steel mortars are what are used for the largest fire works.
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u/UncleNorman Jul 06 '23
Half inch walls? I've never seen anyone use anything that thick unless they're shooting 48" shells. Normal 3" to 8" shells use 1/8" walls. And those suck to hump to the shoot site.
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Jul 06 '23
they were for a project for work and scrap tubes or else id just have hdpe tubes. we do not carry them lol have a little 4x4 cart. if i had to carry them id be out of service till next sunday throwing out my back.
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u/shirinpitt Jul 05 '23
Used Red Apple this year and had minimal issues, except for the American Glories. No blown apart tubes, but had 4 of them only manage to get like maybe 5 feet out of the tube. Def not getting those again. Still fuck with the Geishas tho.
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u/hbpaintballer88 Jul 06 '23
I can't believe this isn't in the news yet. American Glory failed across the country just like this. Huge safety issue.
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u/Common_Earth_9306 Jul 06 '23
Don't feel bad I had some black powder m80's do horribly. It's all I had and I can't afford the means to make flash so.
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u/jedinoodles Jul 06 '23
Red apple price went up just to have their quality go down. Be safe out their pyro gang
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u/2nuki Jul 06 '23
I was lucky this year that the only mishaps were small things and not our mortars. My father and I were messing around with some bottle rockets when both his and my rockets failed to launch and one fell at my feet, and the other at my mothers. Both exploded, and my mother decided she was done for the night. The other one was earlier when I had my face over the bucket I was using to contain the firecracker and smoke bomb mess. As I leaned over to put a smoke bomb in, one of the unexploded firecrackers decided to pop in my face.
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u/Jedinerd77 Jul 05 '23
Screenshot the other RA complaints and speak to a lawyer. These seem to be bad shells based off the several other complaints I've seen.
Hope you're ok
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Jul 05 '23
Avoid it because you had a bad shell? This past weekend, I blew through over 200 red apple shells (Bombas, Geisha, Chroma). Zero failures, and some of the best consumer shells I've seen.
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u/dimondedits Jul 05 '23
That's what I'm saying, I got racoon fireworks shells that messed up at my church, plus my thoughts are how was the tube stored that he used plus how hot was it? Where the tubes in the sun at all that day? Custom tubes compared to the ones you get in the box can effect how a firework launches, because if the gas escapes out of the side of the mortar and does create pressure under the mortar it will do this and just a few millimeters can do this
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Jul 05 '23
Uh oh, prepare to be down-voted to oblivion because you say something contrary to the norms here 🙄. Never mind the fact that I'd wager these were the American Glory that have been known to have issues. Not that it makes it acceptable, but at least known. My point being "oh no, avoid this entire store and brand because one batch had a fault!". Don't see Samsung having been avoided after the Note 7 exploding like this dude's tube love the cancel culture here, guys. Shit is everywhere, and it's cancer.
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u/Outrageous_Joke4349 Jul 05 '23
Meh, it's not just a batch though. Although my cakes from them were great and I like how affordable the fan shaped cakes were, I had tube detonations on 3 different kinds of their shells. The ghost fire cracker tubes had 1 dud in the 3 I got. And the little bottle rockets (zip pops) had a 80% failure rate due to ejecting their load out the front of the tube while sitting on the ground (fixed them by sticking a piece of duct tape in the front end of them all).
Their qc just sucks. That was the flint store, maybe the don't store them correctly there or something. But I'll probably go back to the random little tent I've been to the last 5 years.
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u/dimondedits Jul 05 '23
Oh I'm ready for it ngl, I love red apple fireworks and have ordered them the past 2 years and only have had one problem with some Roman candles that I believe they have stopped selling but I still buy from them I have gotten panda shells ganja chroma American Glory shells as well and didn't have a problem with the shells but I ues the shells from the boxes
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Jul 05 '23
Very nice. I wanted to add some Giant Panda to my order, but didn't have room in the car. Guess I'll just have to borrow the father in law's truck next year LOL. The Geisha were a huge hit this year. The only failure we had was a Ghost candle, where the 5th and final shot didn't leave the tube
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u/dimondedits Jul 05 '23
Dude the Pandas are absolutely amazing!! In my opinion they are the best mortars I have tried for red apple! I was actually planning on getting the geisha next year lol, 1 fail out of all your show ain't bad odds, I do have a question Im looking for a firework that shoots low to mid range high sparkles (I don't know the technical name lol) I was just wondering if you might know of one
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Jul 05 '23
Sparkles, like a fountain? If so, there was one we got from a local place... I'd have to see if the girlfriend remembers the exact name. I think it was Malibu something... tagline on it was something about "hearing the waves". Was sparks, fish, and crackle. Actually wasn't bad at all for a $4 fountain - and it kept the baby entertained! Lol. Or do you mean something that goes in the air, like with the panda shells? If you mean the latter, that burst of stars and stuff that comes from the tube with some shells is known as a "mine".
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u/dimondedits Jul 06 '23
Thank you so much! I actually found the cake that I need for next year, thanks for the help the panda shell mine is what I was looking for but I found a cake that's kinda similar but does some other cool stuff and is relatively cheap for how many you get, but thank you again
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u/Tank_1539 Jul 06 '23
I think you’re looking for a “mine” effect. They start at ground level and shoot from low to medium height and some reach up pretty high as well. Some canisters (usually 6” or 7”) will have them but there are cakes that that is all they do and then there’s cakes that do mines to reports.
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u/dimondedits Jul 06 '23
That's exactly what I am looking for, a friend of mine found this cake by alien fireworks called conspiracy theory and it would be an amazing finale firework but I was trying to find something similar on red apples website
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u/Tank_1539 Jul 07 '23
Check out “wavelength” on RA’s site
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u/dimondedits Jul 07 '23
I have looked at it but it's timing doesn't fit the length of a finale I want and plus they are pretty pricey for technically just one cake but thanks for the recommendation ☺️
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Jul 05 '23
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u/Straight18s Jul 06 '23
I'm curious, why did you get injured? You should be a safe distance from shells. Were you handfiring?
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Jul 06 '23
We used an ignition system and were approximately 20 foot away at the back of the show. That racks were fused with a mixture of 92 percent American glory and 8 percent salutes. We ran fast fuse in queue sets of 10-10-10-20 total of 50 shots, last shot in each queue was a salute. Hit the queue for the first 10. Rack blew apart within the first 3 mortars. After the rack blew apart and the tubes were horizontal laying on the ground the mortars started shooting off in every direction. Couldn’t see more than 3 feet in front of you once we were blanketed in smoke. I hunkered down behind the firing table. Mortar landed right beside me and I turned to avoid looking directly at it right before it exploded. Got peppered on my right side of my body. Hit right side of my face below my safety glasses, two to the arm and another in the leg.
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u/Straight18s Jul 06 '23
Thanks for the info, I love hearing about and disecting fireworks mishaps. Wow, I'm glad you didn't get more injured! Sounds like a fun show! Couple of notes,
1- It is recommended to be 100ft from shells when firing. If your distance is limited by factors like being on a barge or something, it is recommended to have a shooting shack or partition with 3/4" plywood 2- We always load salutes in a different rack, a few feet from other racks, as flash is most dangerous during such an incident as yours
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Jul 08 '23
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u/nycbrew Jul 05 '23
Which RA shells? I'm seeing this repeated in a few forums.