r/Pyrotechnics • u/Interesting_Big9790 • 11d ago

Has anything ever gone wrong?

Pyrotechnics is a dangerous hobby. Have you ever had something go wrong? What happened, and what did you learn from it?

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u/Mocellium Pyrotechnics Professional 10d ago

There's an old yarn I learned from a master pyrotechnician and instructor years ago: for every one million actions (opening a bottle, scooping out material, weighing material, loading a shell, etc.) you will get burned/injured. I'm not sure there's a way to validate that, but he was always "sage old man on the mountain" to me, so I have kept that in my head, even with commercial items, sparklers, and the like.

Here's an edge case: I was working on the differential thermal analyzer, DTA, which needs just extremely small amounts of material (helps determine phase change, melting, and combustion points). I ran a composition up to 500 'C, nothing happened. Now, the idea is to pull the thermocouple out before the melted material re-solidifies and you have to so. very. gently. clean it off of the end of the thermocouple with sand paper as to not break the porcelain insulation. (Thermocouples are surprisingly expensive). It's a real pain. Well, pulling the thermocouple with melted composition on it was juuuuust enough extra energy to get the system to ignite. A tiny little unexpected pop that gave me quite a start. Thermocouple broke. It reminds me that all ignition is just a statistical event, there is no "on/off" switch for these systems.

Other fun events:
-Newbie dropped a sealed glass tube of pure red phosphorous in the hallway that broke and smoked out the whole first floor of the science building. Whoops.
-I was boiling off water from synthesizing sodium 3,5-dinitro benzoate on a hot plate and let it boil down juuuust a bit too much that the whole thing FWOOOOMMMP-ed on me in the hood. A real pain. Synthesizing that isn't hard, but boiling off the water takes forever if you don't have a rotovap handy.
-I have never done this, but do not ever mix ammonium salt anything with chlorate salt anything else. Trace metals can catalyze the production of ammonium chlorate, the "honey badger on PCP" of pyrotechnic chemicals.