Steel wool... to infinity and beyond!

1) hardware mesh

A suggestion - hardware mesh can be used instead of chicken wire when making the containers for your Steel wool. Hardware mesh is basically chicken wire, but has square shaped holes. It is tougher to bend than chicken wire, but you can make some really cool cubes and stuff with it.

smit agrees thats what my cages are made from. bird feeders will melt through after a little while.
i have cylindrical cages

2)connecting the Steel wool cage to your chain

Whether you use chicken wire or hardware mesh-- it is a good idea to loop more than one 'cell' of the wire/mesh through whatever device you use to hook the Steel wool cage to your chain. The metal cage can get quite hot, and the whole thing might fly off if connected to your chain by only a single cell.

AND DONT USE SPLIT RINGS

3) grades of Steel wool

Also, as was discussed, there are 8 grades of Steel wool. They are:

0000, 000, 00, 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 (0000 being finest, 4 being the most coarse)...

For kicks, I tried it with 4, and the wool did not produce any sparks - it simply turned into a molten ball. Lame. Finer Steel wool is better.

not so sure on this. ive found that after coarse grade has welded itsel finto a ball bits of spark will still fly off through the bottom of the cage and the coarser grade the longer the burn time.
4) audience placement with Steel wool

If you are doing a butterfly or 3 beat weave, be sure you are in profile to your audience - otherwise you will shoot sparks all over them... I like to be *at least* 20 feet away from folks when doing this.

I have found that this should be used as a kind of finale. Once an audience sees you shooting sparks 20 feet in the air, regular fire poi seems kind of lame. Just my opinion.

yeah. bear the wind factor stringly in mind as well. sparks fly then drift

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better photos to follow

love those sparklers. will try the wrapping wool round devilsticks also and my mum is getting me some science supplies to work with as well

Right, enough talk already.. I'm going out to the garden with some copper / steel wire and a camera - back with photo's in a few mins!

Foo! My plan failed - 2mm thick chunks of copper don't work - it just looks like regular Wire wool :



It did, however, give the cages a bit more weight which was nice - they normally feel a little light! I've got some thinner, stranded copper wire around here somewhere, but I can't find it right now

try oxidizing your "copper wool" first so you might be able to get a copper chloride wool, but soak it in fuel first because oxidizing it reduces the conductivity of a metal....

*bumps*
cos its come up in conversation recently