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2004 Display

Well this year there are more 500 Gram cakes out there than you can count, our display focused this year on roman candles, mortars, and a few of 500 Gram Cakes. There are 5 new racks that are going be used this year in addition to the racks that were used last year.

Roman Candle Rack

This is the new large caliber Roman Candle rack, due to the power that these larger candles have the other racks that I have design are not as solid as this new design. This design has the potential to hold even bigger diameter roman candles.



The Roman Candles in the rack are Black Cats Gold Collection RC-1. These candles are excellent. Notice how the rack has enough space for 6 candles of this diameter. I have also tried roman candles with smaller diameters and had not problem with them in this rack, just make sure that the top of the candle is above the top guide rail.


 		 This year we decided to use two old wooden ammo crate boxes to store our mortar shells in after last year when a rocket almost landed in the cardboard box we were storing the mortar shells in. I would recommend to anyone that has to reload shells to store the shells in some type of either wooden or plastic storage container to prevent accidental ignition of the shells. We are working on plans for wooden storage boxes that will be done before the next 4th of July.
 
This new rack design will allow each rack to be chained together. Notice on the rack that the left screw eyes are higher than Mortar Rackthe screw eyes on the right side. By 10 shot mortar rackdoing this the racks can share a central stake. This new standard design is easier to make than the older design that we have on the site. This standard rack can also be screwed together with other 10 shot racks to form larger racks that can contain enough mortars to do your whole show. We have used this standard design and just changed the piece length to form a number of different mortar count racks, currently we have a 4, 6, and 10 shot. With this new design it also allows itself to be easily combined with other racks to get different type of angle racks. We have also now designed racks in other styles of setup;  "V", Angle. With the new design it replaced the need for the old design, however these rack plans will not be put on the site. If you want one of these racks they will be available at consumermortarracks.com.  This rack on the right can be put together under 20 minutes where the older racks took from 30-60 minutes to complete. When we get more of these racks built we will have more articles about this new design.  Email us to let us know if you want to know more about these racks and our prices for these new design racks, we also can do custom rack orders too.
 
This rocket rack will solve the problem of reloading rockets into the copper pipe and allow for a quicker launching of rockets. This rack will hold 30 Thunder sticks for our show. If you haven't tried Phantom's Thunder Stick buy a pack you won't be disappointed. We have another rocket rack designed for taller rockets this one is good for rockets up to 18" long the other rack can handle the larger rockets from 18" up.
 		 Mortar Shell and Mines
This setup was used in one of our angle racks, the triple break shell was piggybacked  on top of a mine shell. The idea was for the three mines to go up and the triple break shell to break on top of the mines. This was fused perfectly. The theory and techniques of fusing things like this will start to be added to our fusing section of the website. Check for more of these throughout the summer.


This rocket rack can hold longer rockets than the one above it. These two racks made sure that the rockets flew straight, it also allowed us to light multiple rockets at a time. If you are into rockets I would recommend you to build one of these racks.


Right- The cake on the right is World Class's American Rhythm 500 Gram cake in all there are 156 shots with the last 6 shots going off at the same time, into red, white, blue chrysanthemums, at the end. This is a beautiful fan style cake a must for any finale, next year we will get 2 of these for our consumer show.


 
The picture to the right is the layout of all of our racks notice that everything except for cakes are build into racks. This prevented any possibility of any item tipping over. If you look at the racks you will also see that they were secured with 1/2" rebar, this makes sure that the rack cannot tip over during the show. If you look in the back corner you can see our 18 shot angle rack that was used to simultaneously launch 18 single, double, triple shells for the finale.

This rack I used last year for the finale, but I didn't fuse all of the shells together. This year we decided to launch all of the shells in this rack at once. This took some thinking about how to fuse it so all fuses ignited and went off about the same time. How we did this is in our new advance fusing section of the fuse area. The picture to the right is part of the the effect. This worked really nice and everyone at the show was impressed. The shells that we used in this rack were 12 - Triple Break, 3 - Double Break, and 3 Canisters shells. Next year we are going for 36 shells fired from two of these racks.

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