The short answer is that there are never enough shells in a fireworks display!
When we first got started, the one thing I knew I wanted was mortars and shells. Those are the tubes that you drop a shell into and light it, big boom, then nice colorful explosion in the sky! The problem with the tubes is that you can only get a few to go off at the same time by putting them close together, then twisting the fuse together, then light it and watch them go off. Then, start over. I wanted more and I didn’t want to stop between each set to setup the next set.
On our very first show, we put together some quite simple mortar racks. They consisted of 6 PVC tubes attached to a board. We had 10 of these. So we were able to launch 60 total shells for that show and it was great!
Shortly after that, we realized that PVC was not the correct choice and upgraded the tubes to HDPE tubes (PVC shatters and creates shrapnel, HDPE tears and doesn’t shatter). Much safer!
Well, 60 shells wasn’t enough. We completely redesigned the mortar racks and came up with a system for each rack to hold 60 shells. We built 8 of those for our 3rd show. We jumped from 60 shells to 480 shells! That was a great show!
As it turns out, 480 was good for about just that 1 show. Next year, we added 6 more racks to the collection. Now our 4th show had 840 shells! How awesome that was!
It was awesome enough to last 6 years!
Now, for our 10th anniversary, we are adding 2 more racks to the family. A total of 16 racks each holding 60 shells. That’s 960 shells for this year’s show!
Hope to see you all out there so you can experience how wonderfully loud and awesome this many shells going off is going to be!