.. Most chinese shells are fine meal D on rice hulls and spread
throughout the shell. The meal D burns very fast, but this is not
black powder or flash or whistle. I recently found out that you can't
use flash or whistle in consumer shells for the main burst even star
shells because I guess the cpsc finds them too energetic even though
they are not being used as ground salutes or rocket candle salutes,
flash or whistle used to ignite the burst has to be less than 2% of
the total composition. Standard high grade black box artillery shells
usually have about 30 grams of comp, that means you could only use
about half a gram of whistle or flash for ignition (not bad for
ignition). Back to the point. I have found the new small cylinder and
ball 1 to 1.5 inch shells have a different burst. Its about 1 to 3
grams of burst (depending on shell size) and uncoated rice hulls with
micro stars/crackle or very small round color stars for the larger
shells. Even a premium 1.5 inch small festival ball in a blue box had
this burst. All the bigger 1.75 shells have the meal coated rice hulls
even the premium cylinder shells like excaliber and brothers smoke in
mirrors. It was the well constructed, well fused small festival balls
break that made me dissect one. It was a pretty good thump and spread
but no flash. I carefully cut the shell open with a very sharp special
blade, the walls were not that thick and it split in half easily.
After removing the stars and uncoated rice hulls this is what I found.
A very light grey fine powder w/o aluminum with tiny shiny dark
specks. It was a small amount 2 grams at the most. In an atmospheric
open air burn test 100 mg was lit unconfined. It went up very fast but
no flash, whistle is brighter than this stuff, it gave off a bit of an
orangish flash I guess. It was slower than flash but much faster than
BP w/o much smoke. Anybody know what this burst is? I wonder if H3 is
legal as a main burst in consumer shells. The rice hulls are never
coated with anything with this mix, the tiny little round 1 inch
mighty mights use it also. These are all Chinese shells. Shimizu came
up with H3, I think it should be legal for consumer shells as a main
burst charge, but a lot of places say they only use black powder in
consumer shells. This isnt BP, smells nothing like it, barely any
smoke.
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