Fire eating wand attack

So a few hours ago I decided to get in some fire eating practice for a Halloween Party this weekend. I got my safety, set everything up, inspected all my equipment, made sure there was no wind, and lit up. Everything was going great. I had just put the torch in my mouth to do a spit transfer, when a 4 inch flame started shooting sideways out of my mouth. I quickly extinguished the torch and inspected it. I immediately notice that the silver tape had separated a tinny bit about 1 inch down from the wick. I relit the wand to see if that was the problem, and sure enough, as soon as I turned the lit wand upside down, the 4 inch flame started shooting out of the small separation in the tape again. I’m still not entirely sure what caused the flame thrower effect. But If I had to guess, I’d suspect that the dowel under the silver tape, somehow absorbed some fuel, and something about pressure.

But anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem or other equipment problems with fire eating wands? I was also curious what the average life of a fire wand is?

Yep, that would be the reason I never use wooden dowels in any of my fire prop designs, the aluminium flashing tape tends to separate from the wood with use as the glue etc melts / disolved by the fuel, seen this effect mainly with swing clubs. Although to be fair with regular maintainance if the form of re wicking and replacing the foil should reduce this problem. All my fire eating / breathing props are built be me on a tubular metal former. Built using appropriate materials and treated with respect most of my fire eating wands are four years old now.

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