[Jonathan Crawford] is ready and willing to fire things up with his flaming trombone. A couple of years back his band teacher was going through the storage room triaging instruments. This trombone suffered from a bad case of red rot and would never function well again so [Jonathan] was able to get his hands on it and get to work.

He started by sanding down the instrument and painting it with high-temperature spray paint. Flexible copper tubing intended for an ice maker was used to relocate the propane outlet inside the bell of the instrument. A barbecue igniter, controlled with the player’s left thumb, lights the flame.

The torch that [Jonathan] is using would only allow a small amount of gaseous propane to come out the nozzle. He ended up drilling out the aperture, and using a short piece of vinyl tubing to bridge the gap between the nozzle and the supplementary copper tubing. At full blast this allows liquid propane to escape so be warned.

You can see him demonstrating this indoors in the video after the break. He mentioned to us that the first time he tried this out he set off the smoke detector. You’ve got to be careful when playing with fire, whether it’s a musical instrument, or a wearable flamethrower. So, you know, don’t try this at home. Read the rest of this entry »

[Everett] is at it again with Prometheus, an arm mounted flame thrower.This is the third generation of the project and makes some huge advances over the second generation we saw last year. We’d say he’s reached cinema/stage-performance quality with his design.

The self-contained system is completely arm mounted with a fuel reservoir mounting behind the elbow. The new version adds an adjustable flow valve actuated by a servo motor to regulate the flame size. An arc generator has been incorporated to replace the lighter from the last version. A microcontroller measures wrist angle and takes care of creating the arc and regulating the fuel supply.

Prometheus is small, controllable, and frightening. See a full demonstration as well as some video of the prototyping process after the break. Does this make you wonder how much burn cream [Evertt's] needed over the years?

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