Planning the Sequence

Having unpacked everything and sorting each item into groups (cakes, fountains, candles, etc), I can easily find individual items if necessary. Sometimes I need to check where a fuse is on a certain cake, or the diameter of a barrage tube, to help me figure out how to mount it.

Unpacked, counted and sorted.

Each act was quickly sketched out, to provide a rough idea of what sort of racks will need to be built. It's handy to have access to scrap wood pallets at work, so I've brought a few home. Using pallets is awesome. Wood may be flammable, but to flame it needs sustained heat for a longer period of time than fireworks provide. Pallets are transportable, making them a good choice for reasonably quick set-up at the blasting site. Furthermore, the space between the bottom and top stringers on pallets is where I run the visco; keeping the stray sparks that spit out of it from prematurely igniting the wrong fireworks.

Planning sketch.

Sketching the order of things not only helps plan the physical layout, but the direction it will face the audience and the spidery order of running visco to ignite everything. Though I'll be paying closer attention to the timed length of each piece of fuse when I set fireworks in place, for now the estimated times are written down so I may know which side to orient a firework, and how much visco I'll need. This information is already on the Gantt chart made for each act. In the sketch, quick fuse is in red, and slow-burn in blue.

Bringing home scrap wood and pallets, along with re-using a couple of racks from last year will help me make sure that 98% of my budget for the show goes into the pyrotechnics.