Well The Vulcan Project 06 is done, but we’re already looking ahead for ‘07.

Our aim for next year is to set off over 100,000 bottle rockets! Obviously this is a huge scale project, so if you would love to see a video of 100,000 rockets, OR come and witness the project for yourself, let us know, and if you can, please help us accomplish this financially by donating what you can. Thanks alot.

Step 1: Buy fireworks.

We used the cheapest we could find, which were moon rockets. Be sure to buy-by-the-case and shop around. We managed to buy 4 cases at $30 each (each case contains 25 grosses, about 150 rockets a gross).

Step 2: Find a cardboard box.

If your buying in large bulk, sometimes the fireworks attendant will give you boxes to “carry” them home in. If not, do a little dumpster diving behind office depot and you’ll find plenty of cardboard boxes.

Step 3. Build the box

We cut our cardboard into strips and ductaped them together. Be sure to pad the walls with several layers of cardboard, because there is going to be so much heat, you wouldn’t want one wall to collapse during the firing process.

Cut the height of the box so that the top half of the bottlerocket is exposed when standing inside the box. This will allow enough oxygen into the box so that rockets will go off more evenly.

Add a divider every so often in your box. This will allow the rockets to stack more evenly and will be easier to manage. A good rule of thumb is to put at least one divider per every case.

Step 4: Stack the rockets

Place the box so that it sits on its side with the opening facing you (assuming you are sitting). Then slowly and neatly place the opened grosses of rockets within each section. This is the most tedious process of building the Vulcan, but its important, because you don’t want your rockets to collapse on each other. Also, a good rule-of-thumb is the tighter the rockets are in placed within the box, the better.

Step 5: Add the sparklers

The secret to setting off large amounts of bottlerockets in a short period of time is to create a lot of heat, and what better way to do so then to add a bunch of sparklers. We used about 60 sparklers in our Vulcan. Place the majority of the sparkers sporadically throughout the Vulcan. Be sure to save 4 sparklers per section and try to cover as much ground as possible. With the 4 sparklers per section (we had 4 sections, so 16 sparklers) that you have left over, make a very tight triangle with the 3 of the sparklers in the center of every section. Then place the remaining sparklers in the center of the triangles about half-way in. These are going the be the sparklers that you light.

Thats pretty much the process of building. Also make sure to shoot this off somewhere that isnt going to set lots of things on fire, it does have the tendency to shoot rockets all over the place.

And There you have it folks, buy up your local dealers stash of rockets and try it for yourself! And don’t forget to tape it! We’ll post your video here if you make your own vulcan and record it, just contact us at tamurra@uark.edu.

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In addition to this site, we have a presence on the web at these other locations:

myspace.com/thevulcanproject
aimpages.com/thevulcanproject