When I was 12 or 13 I discovered sugar rockets.  For the body I used spent shotgun shells and removed the center primer.  I mixed up my own suger / KNO3 mixture.  I got my mom to buy the postassium nitrate for me from the drugstore.  From one of the ads in the back of the old Popular Science mags I bought underwater fuse.  I cut a length of fuse to run the entire length of the shotgun shell and a little more to hang out, then packed the rocket fuel around it - carefully. I don't remember how i plugged the open end of the spent shotgun shell.  My rockets really flew!  My mother didn't try to stop us even though she was probably worried we would kill oor maim ourselves.  She even watched some of our backyard launches.  That was back in the 1960's when kids built forts in the woods and "go carts" without adequate brakes and rope steering  with old boards and rusty recycled nails, made rockets and fireworks and hydrogen gas from lye and aliuminum and many other things that could have killed or maimed us.  What didn't kill us made us stronger.

50 years ago when I played with home made fireworks I made my own fuse.  I slowed the burning rate of the blackpowder  meal I made by mixing corn starch with it.  I was trying to approximate dynamite fuse and through experimenting I managed to do that. I put it in a paper core and coated that with asphalt I dug out of the road in front of our house in hot weather and wrapped a layer of cloth around that, the lacquered that.  It burned under water ok.  I had a lot of accidents, burns, but never had serious injury.   I was just lucky some of the time.

I used to make fireworks as kid way back in the 70s long before the internet I got the basic gunpowder mixture out of an encyclopaedia.  The fuse type I used to make was based on the ‘blue touch paper’ simply soaking tissue paper in a saltpetre solution and allowing it to dry.  I never thought of using the sugar saltpetre method.
Another form of oxidant  I often used was sodium chlorate though not as often as it’s a poisonous weed killer.  Sodium chlorate became much harder to purchase in the 70s as it was a favourite of the IRA in their weed killer bombs.  They started selling it with a fire retardant although it still seemed to work just as well.

Many decades ago, as a kid, I needed fuse "for a friend." Mixed homemade gunpowder with alcohol to turn it into a liquid, soaked cotton kite string in it, and let it dry. Worked great.

When I was in jr high in the late sixties I made fuses for my aluminum pipe bombs by gluing match heads to a bead of model glue that led to a hole in the casing. One had a tendency to light the fuse at the wrong end, which luckily  never caused an incident.  I harvested the lengths of aluminum pipe from the chaise lounge that was in the back yard. It was good clean fun and kept me out of trouble.

Another homemade fuse design that I tested is to dissolve 40g of the powder rocket fuel in 100mL of water, and use a pipet to carefully drop the saturated solution onto a paper towel. Once it's dry, it works perfect as a slow burning fuse, even if you don't roll it up. To make it burn brighter/faster, repeat the soaking and drying process one or two times. To use, just roll it up and light it.

A suggestion for improving the tissue paper fuses: melt some parafin wax and coat them in it.

Should help in case they get wet to make them less brittle or soaked.

Very educational and entertaining. I will never ever duplicate these, but I really enjoyed just watching.

Very educational I shall not uses to make a fertilizer or any kind of pipe bomb

Sugar solution, cotton string/butchers' twine, then dry. Common household items. You can use a coil of this for starting your charcoal, and it takes up very little space for storage. Also, 000 steel wool rusted and powdered with mortar/pestle will provide for faster (hotter) oxidation for your coil. Handy camping trick & VERY inexpensive.

As a kid in the 60's, i used good quality waxed cotton string , as delay fuses for my fireworks (very strong but thin string- dont be fooled by some modern fake stuff called "waxed cotton", that actally is just some kind of plastic/synthetic rubbish, easily spotted as it melts when heated).
Worked well, just light and let it burn a moment, then lightly blow out flame, and the still glowing tip keeps going along the string, (works best if not touching anything, which may put it out). Burnt nice and slow, i often ran 15 + minute delays.

Wow! Very interesting!  I’m glad I didn’t know this as a kid cause I was stupid enough to figure out how to blow up something valuable or remove a limb. That being said, this would make a really cool science fair project for my kid….who is smarter than me or so Darwinism would suggest.  Thanks!

You are the most learned chemist I have come across two very big thumbs up from you

in the good ole days of my youth , fireworks were my love.. I grew up and became and old man , never giving up my love for making them . had some bad accidents that were close calls. so I would never suggest anyone ever mess with them until you know all there is to know about how accidents can happen by doing or mixing something in the wrong conditions . so many things can happen that you wouldn't ever be thinking about. very dangerous .

Very entertaining and educational. I totally won't go to our hypermart tomorow ready to spend some cash buying everything I need to make my own fuse and a sugar rocket.

Back in about '74 on the advice of a friend as to how to make an explosive I bought loads of boxes of matches, carefully crumbled off all the heads, put  them in some water (I think just water) they dissolved and I rolled the mush into a ball and set it aside to dry for a few days. I then picked it up with the intention of braking it into small pieces and it blew up in my hand. Burnt the hell out of me. I still have a photo somewhere :)

2:30 did this one, now im eating doritos on the couch watching cartoons

Your video's are terrific! Informative and interesting. Thank you.

Good Stuff!   3:48  Safety note from my days as a Pyro: It is not best practice to use a scissors or other bypass type cutter on fuses....use a single blade.

The first one and the last one are too easy to make they are best🎉❤