Talk:Flash powder

Inaccuracies

The current defnition. as posted, containts factual inaccuracies, some of them dangerous. Notably A Lot Less than '4 ounces' of flash will 'explode' removing fingers, etc.

The '4 ounces equals 1 stick' is a common myth, and just that: Myth. Hoy Hoy!

It's gone now. Thanx 68.39.174.150 21:01, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Proper professionals with experience of fireworks manufacture will be aware of this. 'casual browsers' may be mislead. best

Huge removal

I axed alot of this page because I didn't think Wikipedia was the appropriate place for explosives making instructions. If I'm in error here someone can revert or better yet rewrite the instructions and stick them on Wikibooks. Thanx 68.39.174.150 21:05, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I think we should at least list the ingredients of flash powder, and perhaps one or two common formulas. I agree we don't need a dozen different "recipes", especially when (A) the text appears to be a copyvio, and (B) the uploader admits two are not even tested. Firebug 04:20, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK, I added ths list of ingredients back with no details on use. I know nothing of fireworks terminology so if I try and write something (From the previous revision) I know it'll be vauge or blatantly newbieish. BTW, do you think there should be some warning about the dangers of it, or is it fine without one? Thanx again 68.39.174.150 21:01, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm adding the basic (perchlorate and aluminum) equation. I'll show the work so it's not a mystery where it came from. I agree, a cut-and-paste from totse is NOT a good idea. It probably wasn't copyvio, cause every file on totse has a little disclaimer that says something like "to the best of our knowledge this text is freely available for replication and use" or something. --AK7 20:33, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

What causes report?

I added the section on flash powder exploding without being contained. I think it is important for people to know about this hidden danger. We'd assume flash powder users already know this but it is worth mentioning. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.184.238.142 (talk) 13:59, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Flash powder has all solid reactants and all solid products, right? So what causes the "report?" I would expect that if there were gaseous products a report would be made, due to a pressure wave. Why is there a rise in pressure in the cointainer if no gas products are made? Is the temperature rise alone responsible for increasing the temperature sufficently to cause a "report?" I have never made flash powder, so I'm just going on the equations. KCl and Al2O3 are both solids.-AK7 16:00, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosion For god's sake, you dont even have to change website. All explosions Consisto of an increase in volume and temperature, combined with a relese of gas, it's not just the gas thing, but also the air that is displacedfrom around the explosive will be pulled back( given the vacuum produced).--201.208.149.148 19:28, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

• The products of combustion include potassium chloride, which has a boiling point of 1500 °C, and aluminium oxide, with a boiling point around 3000 °C. Now the peak reaction temperature of course depends on a lot of conditions, but it is certainly well over 1500 °C and quite likely over 3000 °C (many sources suggest ~4000 °C). So there are no gaseous products after the explosion, even milliseconds after the explosion, but there most certainly are during it. The report is almost certainly caused by expanding high pressure products of combustion. -- Securiger 09:07, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

• Another intermediate gas formed is oxygen from the decomposition of the (per)chlorate.

More compositions

I agree that wikipedia is not the place for instructions on how to make explosive compositions. However, i think it should give or at least mention, the less common compositions, for example, barium nitrate with alluminium. Thankyou for reading my suggestion. Also the use of "be warned" in paragraph eight, is somewhat assuming the reader is considering preparation of the composition, which is not appropriate.

I did some research and found several compositions for photographic flash powders. I've added them to the compositions section. Norm Reitzel (talk) 16:21, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Regarding the use of "be warned", maybe some language can be found that doesn't presume the motivation of the reader, but this is a very dangerous substance. Several deaths and thousands of injuries are attributed each year to combustion of these substances -- many from home-made or black-market firecrackers. These injuries range from minor burns to severe burns, amputations, blindness and deafness.
CarolinaSawDust 16:34, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

"Several deaths and thousands of injuries are attributed each year to combustion of these substances -- many from home-made or black-market firecrackers."

Lighting consumer fireworks while being a moron / drunk / trying to show off accounts for most injuries. Most people will never see flash powder as a standalone substance. More people will be killed and injured by morons driving while texting in any given year. Wikipedia isn't responsible for public safety. In fact, the instructions on consumer fireworks make it very clear how exactly they're to be used. --A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 00:22, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

No gaseous products

There are seemingly conflicting pieces of information in the opening paragraphs. Since all reaction products are solid, we should either clarify or remove the statement about the aero-space industry using similar substances in gas generators.

We can only assume either that the flash-powder like mixtures are used indirectly or as an intermediary in gas production, or that these "flash powder like mixtures" are not actually similar to flash-powder at all.

CarolinaSawDust 16:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you. The contrasting statements need to be clarified. If the flash mixtures does not give off any gases why would it be used to produce high gas volumes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.216.1.4 (talk) 20:45, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

 I am not an academic and when I read this statement; "Flash powders - especially involving aluminium and chlorates - are oftenly in-sensitive to friction, impact, and static electricity." I come away thinking that flash powder is pretty safe.It isn't at all and I believe this sentence should be changed to "....are Bold extremelytextsensitive to friction...." etc. Thx  —Preceding unsigned comment added by BrianAlex (talk • contribs) 22:23, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Explosives by Scientific Definition

Flash powders "go off" by deflagration, not detonation. The difference relates to the speed of the reaction within the substance itself. Detonations occur when the reaction front moves through the detonating substance faster than the speed of sound in that substance. A detonation wave is produced, and these shock waves can be focused by a variety of methods. The prima facia evidence of detonation waves is the existance of the Munroe Effect. Deflagrating mixtures, sometimes (and erroneously) called "low explosives" burn at high speed, sometimes faster than the speed of sound in the atmosphere. They do not produce detonation waves, and they do not exhibit the Munroe effect. "Self Containment" refers to combustion of a mixture faster than the speed of sound in the gaseous reaction products (see above). They will produce a shock front in the gas formed during the deflagration. This is responsible for the report when burned, whether the material is confined or not. Slower deflagrating mixtures require some form of confinement to build up gas pressure to produce a report when the conrinement ruptures.

How much of this that might want to end up in the article itself, I do not know. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Norm Reitzel (talk) 21:16, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Fuzzy Photo seems meanigless.

The photo labeled; "Note the shared oxidizer (A) powder for some types of fuels (B)." is too fuzzy to read. ...Meaningless bottles of unknown stuff. No higher resolution available. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.110.90.93 (talk) 21:36, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Citations?

There is one reference and I don't even see the super-text in the article itself. Where are the references for the claims? "Flash powder and flash-powder devices pose exceptionally high risks to children, who typically cannot understand the danger and may be less adept with safe handling techniques" " In certain mixtures it is not uncommon for this sensitivity to spontaneously change over time, or due to change in the environment, or to other unknowable factors in either the original manufacturing, or in real-world storage." "A spark of as little as 0.1-10 millijoules can set off certain mixtures."

Where are the statistics? Where are the references? For all I am concerned, this is a useless article, as Wikipedia relies on citations. Without them, it is absolutely worthless to anyone who is truly an academic. Reading this article could potentially lead to a million problems due to misinformation, so the intelligent thing to do is NOT read it. Now doesn't that seem silly?

To the author of all of this "information": ADD YOUR CITATIONS OR DON'T MAKE CLAIMS. I don't care if it makes sense, its not academic. Its not encyclopedic. Its a waste.

I am not sure how to add the "citation needed" text, but it needs to be on everything in this "article". 205.155.225.1 (talk) 19:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

 Done: For the individual tags, you can write {{citation needed}} or {{cn}} after the statement needing the citation. Sometimes, however, a whole section or article is missing citations, and either {{unreferenced section}} and {{unreferenced}} is (in my opinion) more appropriate in that case. If there aren't enough citations, try {{refimprove}}. Hope that helps!

With regards to finding actual references, there's so much going on here I wouldn't know where to start. Shame. Tomásdearg92 (talk) 08:01, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't agree that the mandate of Wikipedia is to be useful to academics, first and foremost. The text here is likely to be as reliable as any samizdat ever (i.e. close enough to set you on the path). Part of the problem here is that thorough citation would require hours or days of extensive search on the Internet in the domain of homebrew explosives. This will earn you an A+ grade on one corner of the terrorist fire triangle: means, motive, opportunity. As for motive and opportunity, as viewed by Five Eyes, crossing the Canadian border to attend a Trump rally might be considered sufficient. They are pretty good at distinguishing the real thing, but their methods may involve detaining you at security for an extra ten minutes for all your international travel for who knows how many years. For myself, I wouldn't be booking any tight international connections after conducting this research project. — MaxEnt 15:37, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

No it isn't, and there's nothing homebrew about it. There's plenty of reliable pyrotechnic literature out there and wikipedia requires citations, that's all there is to it... and frankly, the information here was terrible quality unless compared against unreliable sources, which it didn't even bother citing for most things. That would have been something. I removed large chunks including all the howto and weasel-ish type "most ancient alien pyrotechnicians believe" and weird qualifiers on which flash formulas were safer (none of them are safe). The article should be mostly neutral now, which is what encyclopedias should be.

For anyone who gets around to it before I do, firstly there's the public Journal of Pyrotechnics which contains multiple articles on flash powder... the Tenney Davis book I added as a ref can fix many of the uncited sections; it was published in 1941 but is still substantially similar to what is being used in modern compositions. I switched over the non-cite reference to an imaginary Clark publication and the pyrodata link which both misattributed chlorate flashes to Clark (who contributed the perchlorate flashcracker formulas to Davis, not the first ones in the table which are published as clark formulas everywhere by someone who couldn't read). Pyrodata is mostly good, but there's a lot of Chinese telephone effect happening there as with other freely available databases that tend to have incomplete or duplicated (I've found up to 4 duplications of the same) formulas mixed in with the good. Ralph Degn's Westech manual (1970) works for the nitrate flashes. I have a copy of Shimizu's FAST on the shelf I can pull more information from, but there's not a lot on flash in there. It hasn't particularly changed since perchlorates went into common use earlier on. Then there's Conkling (Chemistry of Pyrotechnics - Basic Principles and Theory, 1985), George Weingart (Pyrotechnics, 1947), and so on. You'd almost think that pyrotechnics manufacture was some kind of valid career / hobby / area of study and information needn't be tracked down through extensive searches outside of a library card catalog or a single word on google. Finally the Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items vol 6 has some interesting info on page F77 related to pyrotechnic flash photography (regarding those old rotatable single-use-per-side flash cubes which were apparently pyrotechnic-initiated) that might be worth adding since those were around much later than the old open trays of flash powder used when photography was an insanely slow process compared to modern films and the ultra-high output of light was needed to freeze motion under normal circumstances.

I don't think the magnesium flashes were ever actually used anywhere except for colored flash powders which aren't very common / basically not seen outside of Malta and PGI convention competitions (see Degn p. 25) and old timey photoflash which was mixed on the spot because of the shelf-stability issues... Degn gives a single formula which uses both magnesium and aluminum.

I spotted and fixed some things like the partial copying of an illuminating torch formula from the old photographic journal as a flash powder formula (how do you even manage that?). It's not like the old photoflash formulas are relevant anyway, but how do you manage the exact page from a reference then screw up the information from it so completely?

I question the whole paragraph about firecrackers using a chlorate / Sb2S3 mix as well... I've taken the time to unroll a commercial firecracker in the distant past and it definitely had aluminum powder in it. The mixture given isn't even technically a flash powder, lacking a metal component and actual flash (such a mixture would be used as a flashless report if anything, but I'm pretty sure the ratio is off for that), so I'm going to go remove it for that reason alone.

I've left the stuff above here for anyone who wants to help get rid of the citation needed tags. I hopefully got most of the unsourced stuff that was questionable in either chemistry or mechanism. Some of it might have been good advice to follow, but this isn't wikihow and good advice is still bad if the reason given is incorrect. I don't have time tonight to do any more. A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 01:54, 6 June 2025 (UTC)