Fireworks

the grinch

I guess I could use a little social interaction
Joined
Jun 23, 2013
Messages
464
Location
angle vale s.a.
Thats really cool great idea
I haven't seen anything like that before I really like that .
Thanks for sharing
 

diyer

Full time elf
Joined
Jan 5, 2013
Messages
149
Location
Sunbury
As requested by richardd, here are some details of how the fireworks prop was constructed.

The framework vertical and fan section was made from 12x12x1.6mm ally angle, I pop riveted four of these angles back to back to make a 24 x 24 x 3.2mm thick + shape. My frame design wouldn’t be strong enough to self-support, but is sturdy enough for me as I have a 40mm stainless steel pipe attached to the side of my garage which doubles as a flag pole & for Christmas stuff, I propose to attach it to this.
2018-03-25 10.13.19.jpg
To make the exploding effect I just bent the angles into a 2-dimensional fan shape then hacksawed each of these angles about half way along their length and split them again to double the amount of light points. It ended up looking a bit like a tree (as my wife thought that I was building)
2018-03-25 10.17.17.jpg
An aluminium sheet pad was added for the ‘explosion’ lights and a jiffy box added to the back for connections.
2018-03-25 10.16.31.jpg
The lower blue (3 wire 24v) light strings are ones that I used in previous years, I searched along the strings and found where the repeating points were and cut it into sections. These were wrapped back and forth several times to make short bunched up strings, the two negatives joined together and extended to go back to the controller and the positives all joined together as the short strings are assembled to make up the chasing section. A 6 core cable and common positive (for the 12v lights) were run down the length and then the blue light strings were cable tied on.
2018-03-25 10.13.56.jpg
The white ‘exploding’ section is 3 x 1.2W 12V LED modules with 4 short pieces of red tape light, more white modules (3 groups of 3) are mounted along the arms chasing outwards with blue tape light to the outer lights
2018-03-25 10.14.24.jpg
I added mini strobe lights attached to the ends, for the strobes that I used search eBay for “Motorcycle Motorbike Warning Flash Strobe Brake Lights LED White” or try Item # 191877499395 as an example
2018-03-25 10.17.58.jpg
I used a couple of DMX controllers that I had in my box of surplus stuff, an 8 channel plus a 4 channel and a buck converter for the 24v to 12v reduction.
I’m pretty happy with the way that it turned out.
 
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