How do you organize mortar racks for a show?
Generally, when using racks, you have to go in increments of 5 or 3 shots of the same shell size since thats how the racks come.
This must be taken into consideration when a show is being scripted and racks are going to be used. An easy way around this is to just use the same size shell
throughout the show. If your shooting a Pyro Digital (PD) show using a computerized firing system, all the racks of the same
caliber can be grouped together and the computer picks and chooses which group to shoot from. This makes setup much easier. Racks can then be grouped in sets of
4 or 5, which saves time of not having to kleet each individual rack (although there are other methods to minimize this).
How do you secure the mortar racks for the show?
The only legal way to secure your racks is by "kleeting" them together. What the heck is kleeting?! It's quite simple acutally. It involves takes a few pieces
of wood (kleets) and nailing them to the racks. The name of the game is make the racks stable. If you have ever seen one of the videos
of the mortars firing during a show, a finale in particular, you can see its extremely violent. So your kleeting job has to ensure
that the racks will not tip over or come apart while thier jumping around. If your kleeting an individual rack, or even two of them together, you will take one
kleet across the bottom of the rack, making sure it is sitting firmly on the ground, and place two nails (in each rack if more than one are being kleeted together)
and then one kleet across the top (if more than one are being put together), with one nail in each rack. So, two nails
in the bottom and one in the top (at each rack). We use duplex nails (nail with two heads) so that we can pull the nails out with ease at the end of the show during cleanup.
Finale racks are slightly different since they are usually kleeted together at an angle (like a fan) so that you get a good spread and fill the whole sky.
Same kleeting method applies (two nails in the bottom, one in the top), with the one difference of fanning (see picture at top of page, notice the number of nails in each rack).
Click here to watch a video explaination of finale rack setup.
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