Bear Blog

The Death Stars. Our biggest, baddest, poi.  As I mentioned in the write up for the Solaris poi, I was originally trying to design these  when I came up with the Solaris.  It started at Burningman, when Watermelon Dan came up and asked for something truly spectacular.  These wicks popped into my mind.  Why, you might ask.  I’ll tell you.

At the time, I had been playing with designs for several years and I had been working as a mythbuster with NAFAA at the same time.  So I was in a unique position to make, break, and diagnose fire tools.  Nafaa required me to answer questions like “do i really need to soak my wicks for an hour the first time?”  Answering that meant building fresh wicks and finding creative ways to take them apart and see what the fuel content of the inside looked like.

Two big things came from these exercises.  First, I decided then and there that I loved the cathedral design more than anything else.  The were such a b!+<# to take apart compared to the other models available at the time.  We literally had to get a high speed band saw to properly open them up.  The second thing was a fairly deep understanding of kevlars absorptivity properties.

Yes, If you really soak your wicks, the fuel will go straight to the core.  No, it only takes about 10 seconds or less on the biggest wicks we could make. “When the bubbles stop, the wick is full,” became our motto.  Also, I learned a lot more about how much kevlar it takes to do certain things, what causes flame, and what just provides time.

I won’t go into it all, but here’s the short of it.  Most people only really have about a 3 minute show in them.  Those who can perform longer are probably performing to the deeply stoned.  The average, sober audience won’t even look at supermodels doing anything for more than about 3 minutes (4-5 if they’re a favorite…and talented).  So shooting for a 20minute wick was a bit of a fools game.  Done, Step one, get about 3 minutes and don’t worry about the rest.

Next, I knew what thickness of kevlar would hold enough fuel to provide a 3 minute show.  The spikes on this star are targeted at specifically that ratio.  And finally, the fuel needs to mix with air.  There’s an ideal mixture rate, but there’s just no way to confirm that with fire tools.

In this case, we wanted a LOT more fuel than air.  Why?  Well, if you’ve ever seen a rope wick in action, you’ll notice it turns blue.  This is nearly perfect mix of fuel and air.  The flame only turns yellow or orange when enough fuel gets into the mix that can’t find air.  These flammable but unreactive particles function as soot.  When soot heats up, it releases light.  The higher the heat energy, the hotter the soot and the whiter the light.

The smoother the wick, like ropes, the harder it is for the fuel to get into the air.  less fuel means a more ideal mix and bluer flames.  But for big, nasty, yellow/white flames we needed a surface that was heavy on surface area.  More surface means more places for the fuel to jump off into the air.  Hence the “spikes” on the death stars.

So, Back to Burningman.  One year after making Dan the Solaris, he came back.  And again, he says, “I need something bigger”.  This would be about 2003.  So, back to the drawing board.  I wanted a cathedral based design that had a truly prodigious airflow, but held enough fuel for at least 2 minutes.  Fortunately, I had a lot of stuff with me: bolts and wire and a roll or two of kevlar, so I went at it.  Three blasted days later, I had a pair of death stars.

Dan lit them up.  Fortunately they were on long chains.  We had NO idea how big these flames would be.  Then he spun them and the flames almost tripled in length!  These were unreal.  And in no time at all, they were a hit.  Size queens everywhere wanted the big bad boys.

Now, a couple years later, I get told that a certain competitor has Death Stars of their own.  Well, So many things have been … acquired from our site that we’re really getting used to it.  But few have the huevos to just steal the name and all.  *sigh*  Turns out they’re selling kevlar-shelled, stuffed toys made to look like mediaeval morning-stars at almost FOUR TIMES THE PRICE!!!!  Wow.  [Facepalm]

Anyway, so, over the years, we haven’t really dared to make anything bigger than the Death Stars.  The closest we’ve come is the Helix line.  But for certain special orders, we were asked to make double-size death stars, which, really, were much to big to swing without shoulder injury.  However,  we recently discovered the wonders of 1.5″ wide wicking and started making both the Solaris and the Death Stars in “tall boy” configurations.

Tall Boys.  the idea behind this was to keep the weight the same, but reduce some of that core that holds fuel for so long.  So, same volume of wick, just 1.5″ wide and more of it, instead of the standard amount of 2″ wide wick.  For example a foot of 2″ wick is 24 square inches (2×12).  If you divide 24 by 1.5 you get 16, or basically, 16″ of 1.5″ wick is the same amount of wicking as a foot of 2″.  So, apply this to the cathedral formulas for the solaris and death stars and you get a taller version that’s the exact same weight and fuel requirements.  But the taller and skinnier profiles mean MORE FIRE with a slightly shorter burn time.

“But how are the tall boys different from the lanyard weave stuff?  Aren’t they just knock-offs?”  No.  Lanyard weave poi are NOT Cathedrals, they do NOT have a bolt running through each layer of kevlar, holding everything together.  Most lanyards have only staples running part way through the folds to hold them together.  Invariably, after much fewer spins than the tall boys, this staple gives out and they “sproing” open.  Some are even designed to open up, exposing single layers of kevlar to flame on both sides, dramatically reducing overall lifespan.  Buy them if you must, but a tall boy will last a lot longer.

“Hey, I thought you guys didn’t do sales”

Yes, you’re right. As a general rule, we don’t.  But we’ feel this one is a little different.  First, it’s not really a “get this stuff out of here” kind of sale.  This has a nobler purpose: we’re supporting the NAFAA tool check day on March 31st.  The only things that are ON sale are the things we think relate to that: cut kevlar and poi grips.  You may have notice we charge a bit more for cut kevlar than for whole rolls.  Why, you may ask? Well, because there’s a little bit of labor that goes into the cutting and over the period of a roll, it adds up.  We gots to pay our little elves somehow.

As for the grips, well, there’s two things about that. 1) we don’t feel like a lot of people click down into that section as frequently as they could.  So this is a nice way to let folks know about the variety of the various grips we have in stock.  And 2) in the name of fire tool safety, we’re willing to take a little hit to have more poi spinners using fresh grips.  Really, of all the fire tools, poi grips are the biggest single point of failure, and one of the biggest sources of flying wicks.

Okay, and, yeah, we’re kinda hoping that when folks stop by for fresh grips, they’ll look at the poi section and just upgrade.  But we don’t wan to pressure.  We do want safety and that’s why just the grips (and only the safest ones) are on sale.

The Pyrojax were one of the longest running tools in the development stage. Usually, we put something on the board and it’s off in under a year. The Pyrojax spent several years on the dev. table before we were happy with the design.

I know, they look stupid simple, and in many ways they are.  But you’ll notice they don’t look anything like their their non-fire counterparts: Astrojax.  And that’s what took so long.

By trying to come up with a design where the string went through the wicks AND had a smooth flowing action that didn’t destroy the string immediately, we hit a number of walls.  Even when we managed to get a toroidal (donut shaped) design that had a decent flow, the fire cooked the strings, ropes, wires, etc. And getting a flow that got approved by the makers of Astrojax was damn difficult.

Yes, we worked closely with the AstroJax company.  Every step, every design has been combed over by the owner himself.  This design is sanctioned with his blessing.  And while you won’t see our product on their website for liability reasons, you can get a link to us by asking for a fire version.

So, the biggest issue was that circular wicks form a convection current that’s very hot on the inside.  We couldn’t get a string that was high enough heat to resist these temps yet still have a nice smooth play. That’s why the change in the design.  Just that little metal loop was enough to separate the flame enough to take the heat off the string.  But it brought us back to a design that kinda looks a lot like a bunch of other tools.  *sigh*

Another good long drink from the Cup of Get Over Yourself.  :)

The sunhoop ring has a long and strange story.  When we first introduced them, we tried getting local hoopers to try them. One person cut hers up in a pattern that became the Quad, one let it get damaged in a car accident, another demanded that it be destroyed, declared it “evil” and converted to hardcore christianity.  We shipped a couple.  The last one to ship ran us several times the cost of the hoop to get there.  Since most people don’t want to spend $400-500 for shipping across the country, we decided to cancel the model.

Well, years go by, and we picked up a few tricks.  Even make a Sunhoop Quad with removable spines.  This lead me to finally take a crack at Cyr wheels.  We’ve converted two wheels to fire Cyrs (look for the conversion kit on the site soon).  And that effort pulled together all the tools and tricks necessary to re-introduce the Sunhoop Ring.  Good timing too, since abuzz about them was started by a hooper on Glee.  Turns out, she might have been using one of the one’s we shipped.

So, we re-introduce them now.  First, we start with a collapsible hoop with 3 quick-connects.  This allows the hoop to break down into manageable pieces.  Next aluminum 9″ spines for light weight, sufficient separation and we have managed to make them removable too.  Each bank of wicks and spines connect across the hoop breaks to the next bank making one solid wick going round.  Standard 1/4″ – 20 wing nuts connect everything together and make it ready to use.

We threw up a video of the one hooper to master the Sunhoop Ring, to our knowledge (before the Glee video).  She says the experience is pretty intense.  What you can’t see in the video is her hair lifting up from the convection updraft.  This thing gives off a LOT of heat.  Plus, there’s no where to grab the hoop that isn’t near the heat.  So, good, fire resistant clothing, gloves and wet hair are recommended.

Seriously, this thing is freaking dangerous.  Don’t take this lightly.  The video is titled “Death Hoop” for a damn good set of reasons.

so, this one time… at Burningman….

I was sitting in camp enjoying a beer at the Burn some years back when up walked Watermelon Dan (some know him, some don’t. s’cool).  He said he wanted something “more” out of his poi.  Something bigger.  I told him that he came to the right guy.  :)

I futzed around with kevlar for a while until an image of the Death Stars popped into my head.  I tried in vain to make them but, instead came up with a new kind of cathedral fold.  For those not in the know, a cathedral fold typically looks like our medium kevlar poi, and involves folding two strips of kevlar back and forth then stabbing a bolt through them.  The serious advantage of this kind of fold is that EVERY layer gets secured on the hardware.  The new fold involves 3 strips of kevlar, but otherwise has all the same advantages.

I was disappointed, but showed them to Dan anyway.  He loved them.  Immediately he attached them to  his chains and let fly.  He was spinning them near some solar powered walkways lights that had come on while I finished up.  Each time the wicks got near the lights, they’d shut off (presumably because they thought the sun was up and it was time to charge).  So, poi that were as bright as the sun… well, that’s where the name came from.

Yup, they’re bright.  But they’re also very long lasting.  Fresh wicks can burn as long as 6 minutes on white gas.  The cathedral folding makes them tough and durable, for hundreds of burns.  They’re all kevlar so you can use kero or lamp oil to get even longer burns.  (insert Tim the Tool Man hominid grunt).

Eventually, I did manage the Death Star fold.  But that’s a different story.  Now that Dan’s gone, and things have settled, I thought it was a good time to tell this story.

The fire whips have always been a contentious thing.  Leather whips are made by passionate people with a history of painstaking efforts to build their wares.  And you can pay thousands of dollars for a really good whip.  Or you can pay $10 for a something to hang on the wall.  And there’s a big range in between.

There used to be an unspoken agreement between fire tool makers not to step on each other’s toes.  Common designs like the basic staff, or cathedral poi just couldn’t be claimed by anyone, so were treated like open source.  But each of us tended to have a specialty.  Mine was swords, Iron Gypsy made beautiful (and heavy) iron fans and eating torches, and Riz did whips.  Mind you, he only started making whips after seeing the first Whip I on our site and thinking he could do better.  And he did. That freak actually braids kevlar the old fashioned way.

More power to him.  The downside to braiding is a 3 month backlog and hella expensive.  We found that most people didn’t want to wait, and certainly didn’t want to save up.  So we shot for the lower middle.  We tweaked designs to make things work like a real whip, but not cost too much time and money.

The Whip I  was a cotton and fiberglass core with a wrap of kevlar stitched spirally around.  It was an incredible pain to make and we had to charge a lot to cover the labor.  The whip II is little more than a kevlar rope, lightly tapered and tipped.  The advantages were very strong: it was much cheaper to make than the Whip I, it burned better, and it didn’t have fuel limitations (cotton hates Kero and Lamp oil).  If it weren’t for the fact that the whip I could consistently hit a smaller target, we would have dropped it immediately after the II came out.

Performers with both whips came to us with issues: they wanted a harder stop on the handle.  They wanted a marker for the heat zone, they wanted a “fall” in the whip, and they wanted a better cracker attachment point.  We took all these into account and re-jiggered the Whip II into the whip III.  It cost a little more labor, but not nearly as much as the whip I, it had the best target zone of all the whips, and it covered most of the input (sorry, no pewter snakes on the handle).  In the end it was a superior product to the whip I, and started reaching into the feel of those braided things.

But not everyone is gonna like them.  People with extensive whip handling experience aren’t likely to like any kevlar whip.  As someone who taught Kendo for a few years, converting to the fire sword was a bit of a shock.  Like any fire tool the whip ISN’T a whip.  Swords aren’t swords, staves aren’t staves, not from a combat sense.  Yes, you can crack a fire whip, but that’s really boring.  It’s a visual tool.  ALL fire tools are visual.  That the whip can crack should be frosting, not cake.

And that’s how we build these things.  Not hyper tuned for cracking, but rather for the beauty of the display, the shock of the flash, and the punctuation of a crack.  If you’re looking for something to crack over and over again.  Take my advise, stick with a leather whip.  If you must have fire, go somewhere else.  But if you’re looking for a visual tool that can take you beyond poi, this may be your best bet.

During the initial dip in the economy after the housing market crash, we were looking for ways to save people money. Everyone was buying Kevlar, nobody was buying big ticket items. Clearly a lower cost item was needed in every tool grouping. An economy poi model was also introduced at this time.

Careful observers will notice that approximately the same materials go into the lightweight fans as in the original Countach Fans. The real savings in these models is in the time factor to create them. The Lightweights are much easier to build, about an hour quicker than the original. This saves in labor costs. The labor savings are then passed on to the customer.

The difficult part was the name. Somehow, Economy Fans made them sound cheap or flimsy. We discovered that their bodies were, in fact, a couple ounces lighter than the original Countach. So, we went with the moniker “Lightweight”. For the record, the term Countach [koon - tahsh] is an Italian slur. When the Lamborghini company release it’s Countach model at a car show, they named it after the first sound uttered by the stunned audience. A reporter said “Countach”, loosely translated and toned down: “Holy Crap.”

Fire Fingers. This was one of the first tools we were asked to re-imagine (rather than invent or replicate). At the time, there weren’t as many retailers and pretty much no way to get fire fingers online. Most people made their own or had a close friend make it for them.

So, we were asked to fix a few of the problems with the home recipes. Most of them included armature wire or some other flexible material. So during use, they’d tangle. Worse, they covered the entire finger from base to tip, eliminating a vast amount of mobility. The customer in question was learning traditional Hindu dancing and needed to express mudras.

So, we re-designed the finger attachment and replaced armature wire with L-shaped brass. The first version included fitted cuffs for each finger. So, when people ordered them, they had to measure around each finger. They were arduous to make and had to be labeled so that you could get each torch attached to the correct finger.

When we came up with the idea to make them adjustable, a lot of things needed to be taken into consideration. First, we tried padding the finger grips, but that compromised the rigidity. Plus, all the paddings we could find were vulnerable to petrol fuels. So, we settled on the current one-size-fits-all design. Literally: these things fit the smallest fingers, all the ay up to the ham hocks of yours truly.

But the real inspiration was in the struts. See, we had been making Countach fans for a while by then, and had all these spare pieces left over from their construction. Since it’s our policy not to throw things away if avoidable, they were starting to pile up. I took a good long look at them, and noticed they were evenly split between 9″ lengths and 12″ lengths. It was perfect, we had a new, more rigid strut for the 9″ fingers, and a new size: 12″ fingers.

With the fingers now outselling the fans, the backlog of spare pieces is long gone, and most fingers are cut from new tubes. And that’s where the 18″ lengths come from: half a tube. All of them designed to produce nearly no industrial waste, and the first tool to help us realize that goal.

They’re still the only design intended for the middle of the finger, the only one stable enough to avoid frequent wick crossings, the most secure and the most expressive. And, as always, Steampunk approved.