The Bottom Shot

Nice

Headed down to Lake Cumberland for some fishing, relaxing and sun. Drop a line if your cousin has any fireworks!

It's been almost a year since we lost our otter. We miss you Marley.

My boss just took these yesterday in Maui, cool shots of a sort of self-contained show. He said they somehow did a 5-minute show with three of these tables. Maybe the big mortars were buried in the sand! No shots of them going off, but identify the equipment if you can! Possibly done by "Hawaii Pyro" although I can't find any info about them on the web.

Spent too much time taking video, only got a couple photos. These aren't that bad - next time bringing the SLR and a better tripod head.

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Usually called the crowdfinder, these rockets showed they are also good at chasing cows.

A portion of the 5-minute cake from the b-line.

One of the first shots of the night, a 5-inch shell.

Mines are used to throw sparks from the point of origin up - and will take out anything in between. They don't have a lift charge - so everything comes from the ground. This one Aaron claimed as his!

Aaron shows us how to not blow ourselves up.



The main thing shown here is that if anything is over the mortar tube (gun) during firing, it's toast. This shows a hole blown thru a 1/2" piece of OSB, it didn't even slow down the shell.

My best feelings about the subject of pyrotechnics can be presented in a dialog between Leeloo (the fifth element) and Korben Dallas (nice job, Bruce)

Leeloo: ...jella boom!
Korben Dallas: Boom. Yeah! I understand boom.
Leeloo: Bada boom.
Korben Dallas: Big... yeah, big bada boom.
Leeloo: Big! Bada big boom! Big! BOOM!
Korben Dallas: Yeah! Big bada boom!
Leeloo: Bada boom!
Korben Dallas: Yeah-hahaha! Big boom! Big bada boom!

Link to WAV file :)

What amazes me the most is that while we knew what we wanted, there was no way in hell we knew what we were about to get ourselves into. We left the house at 6:30 AM, made the mandatory stop for mcdonalds, then drove to the certification course and shoot location at the Rosebush exit off 127, just south of Clare, Michigan.

Arriving just before 8 AM, we noticed that we were most likely in Kansas. We were at a farm way outside of town, and about 35 of us made our way to the loft in a barn to sit down and learn our way in the world. A bit too early for excitement, we learned soon why we were there.

Harding says, and we learned from Fred's powerpoint:

"He who hath once smelt the smoke is ne'er again Free"

We were on our way, and knew it. It would be several hours of learning, cramming, and asking questions before each of us was handed a 3" shell, shown the mortar and given a flare to light it. We walked a few hundred yards into a field, donned our helmets and eye protection, and for the first time, dangled a 3" high low explosive non-salute shell (thanks UBpyro!) over a tube, dropped it in, lit it, and did the duck & turn.

Here is my attempt:


Here Dave & Darek:

Last year some friends and I were fortunate enough to come across some good 1.4G fireworks from a nice place in Indiana. We had so much fun shooting them off, we decided to take things to the next level. A few months ago, we were discussing where to go to learn more, and specifically how to move forward and feed our inner children with big booms, big bangs, and large artistic displays of our emotion!

So we found out about this organization called MPAG: The Michigan Pyrotechic Arts Guild, where there would be professional training, eventual certification, but more than anything, a bunch of people who know what the hell they were doing. We knew we didn't.

So after reading up on MPAG.org and finding out what we needed to do, three of us signed up for the course.