By far the most common newbie question with regards to fuse is: “How can I link my whole display on one fuse so it all fires by itself?”. It’s a great idea on paper – set out your fireworks, link them, light one fuse, stand back and admire the show.
Sadly, it won’t work! To understand why, you need to first consider that a typical firework has a running duration of 30 seconds or so but some last for well over a minute. Running with 30 seconds for the moment, if you had just ten fireworks of this duration, you would need 270 seconds of fuse delay leading up to the last firework. At a burn rate of 1cm/s for green visco, thats 2.7 metres of fuse. For a display of mixed fireworks lasting, say, 10 minutes, you would need getting on for 6 metres of fuse.
And this is before we consider the problem of knowing at what point on this fuse to attach each firework. You would need to know the duration of each one and this is impossible to accurately guess given the variation between fireworks (which are hand made and hand fused). Attach it too soon and you will overlap your fireworks, too late and there will be gaps.
Finally, if you’re not already convinced this is a bad idea, consider the safety concerns of initiating a long display and having no means to stop it if anything went wrong.
In most cases, newbies want to fuse a complete display simply because they want to make life easier. The good news is that hand firing is not only easy and cheap, it’s fun too. Or, why not consider firing your display remotely and at the press of a button with a firing system? To find out more about how to do either of these, have a look at the Firing Your Fireworks section.