Thursday, December 22, 2011

Factory Prepares for London New Year's Eve

With just one more day to go before the weekend and Christmas Eve, the factory has been at full capacity preparing for the Mayor of London's New Year's Eve celebrations on the London Eye and River Thames. This year the display is bigger and longer than ever, by including the 12 bongs of Big Ben the entire display is just over 11 minutes. In this time we will be firing in excess of 5,500 firing cues or circuits from any one of 156 firing positions from the London eye and just over a quarter of a kilometer of the river Thames, that is an average of 8 cues per second.

With a display of this size and prestige, we use a wide range of some of our unique effects, below our employee is manufacturing some of our special 100mm mines with red and silver scattering units, just a small quantity of the 12,000 fireworks we will launch in to the midnight sky in nine days time.


As well as manufacturing effects, including bespoke roman candles which we make to duration to fit the soundtrack, there is a significant amount of work required to collect, number, label fuse and box the fireworks. In order to make life simple on site we box the shells in to rail and location so that the crew can pick up a box and know that the tubes they need to load are all in one place.



With a display of this complexity and synchronised to a specially commissioned soundtrack, we require an immense amount of precision in firing and trajectory of effects. Below is one of the many single shot modular units being wired in, these rigs are essential to achieve the patterns and angle of fire we want to achieve to make the display a true performance.


Its not just fireworks, the largest display in the country also requires a significant quantity of equipment. Three 45ft trailers are filled to capacity transporting over 30 tonnes of equipment to London, mortar tubes, racks, holders, ancillary equipment, tools and the props and cradles for the Eye, the FireOne kit alone fills two transit vans and weighs nearly five tonnes.

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