Nitrocellulose lacquer - coating your fuse

Promo discount alert!🚨

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With Christmas and New Year's coming up we’re reducing the price of our visco fuse machine plans (either version) by 20% until midnight on the 31st of December (GMT).

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Simply use discount code “Festive20” at the checkout! Merry Christmas!

Nitrocellulose lacquer is a flammable binding agent used to coat commercial Visco style fuse. The lacquer’s principal functions are to hold the fuse together, make it durable to manipulation and also to make it waterproof.

To make the lacquer you will need Acetone (a cleaning solvent available at most chemists), a glass jar with an airtight lid, scissors and ping pong balls.

Take a ping pong ball (this contains the nitrocellulose) and cut it into small pieces. Cutting the ball into small pieces increase the material’s surface area and speeds up the process of turning this solid into a liquid.

Place these pieces into a glass jar with a sealable airtight lid.

Pour Acetone into the jar so that it a little more than covers all of the pieces of plastic.

Tightly secure the lid and allow the Acetone to fully dissolve the plastic. The result should have a consistency similar to PVA glue or a medium paint. The time that this process will require depends on how much lacquer you are attempting to make. Personally, as I don’t tend to make much fuse at any one time I use a small jam jar, one ping pong ball and about 30ml of Acetone. This produces enough lacquer to coat about 2 feet of fuse and takes in the region of 3 hours to fully dissolve into a smooth lacquer with a consistent viscosity. You can accelerate this process by occasionally shaking or stirring the mixture.

I then apply a small amount of lacquer to the end of my fuse which is still under tension in my Visco machine. Once dry, this allows me to cut the fuse at this point without the thread unravelling.

I then feed this fuse tip through a small opening in a “coating tank” – a rather grand name, for in my case this constitutes a photo film canister. The fuse tip is passed through a slightly larger opening in the other side.

The nitrocellulose lacquer is then poured into the tank and the fuse is drawn though it directly from the visco machine. This gives the first coat and binds the fuse together. The fuse is removed from the machine and a further coat or two is applied as necessary to ensure an even and unbroken coverage. The result is a durable fuse capable of withstanding manipulation; lift chargers, break charges and burning in wet conditions, or even underwater.

A video showing these steps as well as a burn test of the nitrocellulose lacquer alone can be seen in the video below: