Carolina Pyros General

A huge THANK YOU for all who came to the Shell Building seminar this past weekend. I think everyone had a great time, and you got to have some famous Lexington BBQ, as well as talk with some folks who have been involve with fireworks for a LONG time - Bob Willson, My company safety guru has been involved with professional fireworks for over 55 years! Rob Pierce, is a fine craftsman of multi-break canister shells (maybe a seminar on this in the future?), our own member Gary Nunn, who has competed at the PGI with a number of his creations!

I think we will have some pretty interesting effects with these shells. Some of the stars were: Electric Red,

Bleser Red, Davis Snowball, Snowball to Green, Shimizu Blue on Brocade Core, Veline Indigo, modified D-1 Glitter, there were Kamuro Stars, Emerald Green, there were some Red to Green and Green to Red color change stars (I will say here that this was my first attempt at color changing stars, so I am not going to promise that they will all work right! - color changes are more difficult to make), There were some Tiger Willow Diadem, a bunch of just random "Rainbow Stars" left over from the last time, More Shimizu Blue on assorted color cores, and other Red comps as well, and a few others too.

Thanks go out to the few folks who came again on Sunday to help make ALL the lift bags and shell leaders - we managed to finish all the 5" shells on Sunday.

All other shells were completely finished by Tuesday Morning.

Here are the Statistics:

We made 48 - 4" shells and 30 - 5" shells, for a total of 78 aerial shells!

Nearly 100 pounds of fireworks, we used up nearly all of the stars that I had made, and a few that I had on hand.

It took nearly 40 pounds of the Burst charge that I made, both rice hull burst, and granulated cork burst.

A total of 16.2 Feet of time fuse, which was cut into 3.5 second and 4 second delays for these shells.

13.75 Feet of un-waxed lance tube was used to make the spollette tubes in the shells.

Time fuses were cross-matched with 14.25 Feet of 5 leave match (using 3 leaves of black match for each timer.

The gummed tape on the WASP took 4,800 FEET to past all of these shells!

We used 234 FEET of Quick Match for the Shell leaders!

You may ask, how much did these cost to make?

Taking into consideration of the labor - we had 20 people, for an average of 3.9 shells each. If we paid each person $15.00 per hour, for one 8 hour day, that's $2,400.00 in labor. The Sunday folks added 5 persons X 5 hours X $15 = $375.00

For all of the chems, shell hemis, rice hulls, granulated cork, time fuse, quick match, spollette tube, wasp tape, hot melt glue sticks, and all the other parts and pieces, I spent about $1,800.00.

That makes a total of $4,575.00, so each shell cost $58.65 to make.

So each person, at an average of 3.9 shells each, created $228.73 of fireworks shells. Not too bad for your $30 fee, right?

Keep in mind that this does NOT include all the labor it took to grind all the chems, mix all of the comps, hours and hours of rolling, pressing and cutting stars, making the BP comps for the primes and for the burst charge, and then making the burst - I spent about 6 weeks last Fall doing all of that prep work!

Now, at $30 each, for the 20 attendees, I made back $600, from the Carolina Pyros - you can see from these numbers that I did not even come close to breaking even on this project. But, I do this for the love of pyro, and you guys got to see what does actually go on in the process of building fireworks. It is my hope that this club will hep motivate a new generation of people who will actively become part of the fireworks industry. Join organizations such as the NFA, APA, and the PGI - work towards getting your licenses and certifications. Our industry is getting much older folks - I will be 65 this year (Bob Willson is 75!) We NEED younger people to step up and become involved with the fireworks industry - especially on the display side!

So, come on out to the Spring Event, and watch these creations of your fellow members go up - we will be launching these on Friday Night (I think that's right).