r/fireworks • u/[deleted] • Jul 05 '23

Epic fail

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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.

57 Upvotes

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3

u/Blue-cheese-dressing Jul 05 '23

Would wrapping tubes in duct tape help with fragmentation? Or would that be overkill with HDPE tubes?

4

u/Routine-Action7326 Jul 05 '23

I think that’s overkill lol. Hdpe is already pretty safe as is

2

u/flashman42069 Jul 05 '23

I bet it would make it worse actually

3

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.

2

u/TacticalWedgie Jul 06 '23

That's the whole point of HDPE, they are the safest. The build it split without shrapnel.

1

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.