[fc417fc802]

> Today I could get everything for a near-professional show if I wanted to spend the money.

Not unless you're purchasing on the black market or (illegally) manufacturing it yourself.† The professional stuff is substantially larger than anything sold on the consumer market.

† Which is surprisingly trivial to do BTW but please be extremely cautious and very thoroughly master the underlying theory if you decide to go that route.

[trollbridge]

Yep. I volunteered for a real fireworks show in California once. The size of the mortars was… so much bigger than the stuff I was used to seeing people get at fireworks shops.

Along with the reminder from the safety coordinator that each firework was capable of completely talking your arm or leg off. The “consumer” grade fireworks aren’t capable of that, although they’re still dangerous.

[jtbayly]

I'm not sure if being homemade was the reason, but I just heard about a medflight for somebody hit by a homemade firework.

I say this as somebody with a book on how to make them, but I've always been a bit too scared to try.

[fc417fc802]

Being homemade is (almost) never in and of itself a reason. A lack of knowledge or judgment certainly can be. However often the motivation for DIY is to circumvent regulations to go big but of course one of the primary reasons for such regulations is that the associated consequences when things go wrong are dire. The story could well have turned out the same even if the item had been purchased from a reputable vendor. There's a very good reason the professional shows use barges or large fields and set up a huge exclusion zone around them.