NWPAA club shoot - 9/1
Through my shooting with Wolverine, I was invited to attend as a guest a club shoot by the Northwest Pyrotechnic Arts Association (NWPAA). NWPAA, as the name suggests, is a regional pyro club that is fairly small and new, but seems to be doing well for itself given the difficulties of putting such things together. They have insurance coverage for events and a manufacturing permit, at events they shoot 1.4g, 1.3g, and some hobbyist manufactured stuff.
The shoot was at "The Farm" in Tacoma, WA, the same place as the Wolverine Demo I helped with. The location is pretty sweet and there is a great view of Mt. Rainier, plus tolerant neighbors (the site is used several times a year). The weather was sunny and warm, the only downside was little wind once we started shooting, so we had a lot of smoke.
There were maybe 30 people attending the event. I haven't been to any other club shoots so I don't know how they compare, but I'm told this was on the small side, as the event was organized rather last minute. That number included several of us PyroU folks (missinglink, mbahansen, seuss1973, crowninb, Moodog and myself), who were invited to attend and also had ulterior motives. We have been working on getting another Northwest group shoot together and are looking into working with NWPAA in one way or another, so we'll see what happens with that.
A little bit of manufacturing was done on-site, with some very informal classes. One member had quite the collection of stars, and we made a large number of 3" mines. I've made them before, but it was new to some people, so it was cool for them to be able to do something like that (picture on right). I put together one with ruby red stars and firefly with crackle, it seemed like a good combination. It turned out to be rather irrelevant, as you'll see later.
The other little class was on cremora fireballs, or in this case, sawdust fireballs. As Scott said, cremora costs money and you can get sawdust for free, his comes from a furniture shop, and he ostensibly takes it off their hands for pottery use (I think all pyros who have done any manufacture have come up with similar excuses once in a while, I know I have). It wasn't a class so much as him doing some experimenting and us watching, but it was fun (picture below). Some attempts were more successful than others, the key generally being to use more and better lift!
The shoot was at "The Farm" in Tacoma, WA, the same place as the Wolverine Demo I helped with. The location is pretty sweet and there is a great view of Mt. Rainier, plus tolerant neighbors (the site is used several times a year). The weather was sunny and warm, the only downside was little wind once we started shooting, so we had a lot of smoke.
There were maybe 30 people attending the event. I haven't been to any other club shoots so I don't know how they compare, but I'm told this was on the small side, as the event was organized rather last minute. That number included several of us PyroU folks (missinglink, mbahansen, seuss1973, crowninb, Moodog and myself), who were invited to attend and also had ulterior motives. We have been working on getting another Northwest group shoot together and are looking into working with NWPAA in one way or another, so we'll see what happens with that.
The other little class was on cremora fireballs, or in this case, sawdust fireballs. As Scott said, cremora costs money and you can get sawdust for free, his comes from a furniture shop, and he ostensibly takes it off their hands for pottery use (I think all pyros who have done any manufacture have come up with similar excuses once in a while, I know I have). It wasn't a class so much as him doing some experimenting and us watching, but it was fun (picture below). Some attempts were more successful than others, the key generally being to use more and better lift!
Doing inventory, Rod found a large number of "baby B" 1.3g cakes that were slightly damaged in one way or another and not suitable for shows. There were something like 58 cakes, a mix of Oriental Thunder 25 shot salute cakes and Crackling Shimmering Gold 25 cakes (nice white tails to red and green breaks). The obvious thing to do was to fire them all at once! We set them all out and wired them all in series to see if they would all go from a small capacitor discharge unit (picture below).
During the day we mostly hung around chatting, along with making the mines, minor setup, and fireballs. We had the occasional salute shot as well, which led to an exciting moment. Several salutes were fired at once, and two were muzzle breaks, while the others functioned properly. When they went off it made quite a bang at that level, as you would expect, and I thought they had gone in the tube. Luckily they were muzzle breaks so they did not even damage the rack, but I had never seen it happen before, so it was certainly an exciting (and sobering) moment.
Once it got dark the real fun got started. Because I am not a member of NWPAA (though I will probably join fairly soon) I couldn't shoot, but it was nice to be able to sit back and chat without worrying about doing anything. I brought my tripod to try and take some stills, but forgot how to adjust the exposure time and gave up on that plan.
We had to be done by 10PM because of the local noise ordinance, so people tried to move fairly fast and get everything shot. It wasn't particularly organized, so there was a random mix of 1.4g items shot, some homemade stuff, and a bunch of 1.3g shells shot mostly in singles. Some of the 1.4g stuff was great, like America's Celebration (WC), which had huge breaks, and Colorful Carnie (Wolverine), which was much better than I remembered. On to videos!
Clip 1 - One of the early fireballs, which worked pretty well.
Clip 2 - A pair of salutes, not sure what size.
Clip 3 - Random shell.
We had to be done by 10PM because of the local noise ordinance, so people tried to move fairly fast and get everything shot. It wasn't particularly organized, so there was a random mix of 1.4g items shot, some homemade stuff, and a bunch of 1.3g shells shot mostly in singles. Some of the 1.4g stuff was great, like America's Celebration (WC), which had huge breaks, and Colorful Carnie (Wolverine), which was much better than I remembered. On to videos!
Clip 1 - One of the early fireballs, which worked pretty well.
Clip 2 - A pair of salutes, not sure what size.
Clip 3 - Random shell.
Clip 4 - Random shell barrage and a pair of crackle shells.
Clip 5 - Now you see why it didn't matter how carefully I selected colors in my mine. Apparently this was the plan all along. It seemed like a bit of a waste, but still looked cool, and we all found it quite hilarious, as you can hear.
Clip 6 - The barrage of small 1.3g cakes. Around ten either didn't fire, or only partially fired, so it was good they were used here instead of a show. One actually had a hangfire and started firing at least five minutes after all the others finished! Just another example of how you need to let things cool off before getting near them.
So that was basically it. I got to meet a couple new PyroU people, which was a nice surprise, plus all the NWPAA people, who are all nice guys and committed pyros. It was great to see a group in the region that actually does something and has a decent organization to back it up, so I hope I can do more with them in the future.
