Grocery Bags and You

    You will require several paper grocery bags. These are cheap items, for those of us with unusually strong moral scruples. For the rest of us they're free as we swipe them by the stack from the grocery store across the street. Grocery bags are an ideal heavy and rough paper for rolling cardboard tubes. You will also need some scissors, a ruler (or better still, a yardstick), a razor, some Elmer's glue, and a rolling stick.
    Upon the rolling stick I suppose I should elaborate. You have a target tube diameter in mind. Since our homemade tubes will be rolled you will need something round, long, and hard (shut up, all of you) to roll the tube around. I find that a regular old wooden dowel does the trick. Lengths of metal or PVC pipe will also work, as will more mundane and easily scrounged items: Parts of camera tripods, broomticks, giant novelty pencils, and so on. In any event your rolling stick will need to have the same overall diameter that you wish your completed tube to have. Half an inch is good for M-80 tubes. Quartersticks work better at three-quarters of an inch. You can make big fat salutes from one and one and one half inch tubes, also. The length of the rolling stick is largely irrelevant so long as it's longer than the target length of the tube you're trying to make.
    Begin by procuring one paper grocery bag. Using your scissors or knife relieve it of its base. The base of a grocery bag is a useless mishmash of glued and folded flaps; It is of no use to us. Cut the base off as close to the walls of the bag as you can and try to keep everything straight. After this you can carefully peel the seam of the bag apart to unfold it into one large, if slightly creased, rectangle of paper.
    Now, the math. Before you can start rolling away you will need to cut strips from the bag of the proper dimensions to produce a tube of the desired size. Cut your strip as wide as you want the tube to be long. Cut the strip as long as you need the tube to be thick. The thickness of homemade rolled tubes is expressed in terms of "wraps", obviously the number of times the paper is wrapped around the rolling stick. Well, that's how I do it, anyway. I could very well tell you just to make a tube that's 3/16 of an inch thick but you'd have no way of knowing just how much paper that would be. Six wraps of grocery bag paper roughly equates to 1/16 of an inch of wall thickness. For reference, some popular tube lengths, diameters, and thicknesses. Also provided for your convenience are the lengths of strips you will require for given wall thicknesses:
 

M-80 Casing	1.5î width x .5î diameter x ~8 wraps (13î length at .5î)
Quarterstick Casing	3.5î width x .75î diameter x ~10 wraps (34î length at .75î)
Medium Rocket Engine	2.5î width x .5î x 16 wraps (26î length at .5î)
Traditional Roman Candle	14î width x .5î diameter x 16 wraps (26î length at .5î)

    Measure and cut your strip(s). Keeping all the cuts square and straight will save you a lot of trouble later, unless you happen to like the Salvador Dali rocket engine look. If you need to cut a strip that's physically longer than your grocery bag is wide, don't fret. Multiple strips can be rolled into a single tube.
    Now, lay down your strip on a countertop or other flat surface. Place the rolling stick at one end of the strip and roll the paper around it. Roll it just far enough to make the end and the body of the strip meet. Spread a line of Elmer's glue along this junction and roll the stick (and paper, obviously) one quarter of a turn. Hold this in place with one hand and draw lines of glue down the length of the strip with the other - One line of glue every half inch along the strip's width. Now roll all the way down the length of the strip. Roll tightly so air pockets don't form inside the layers of the tube. The squarer you cut your edges the easier you will find it to keep the ends of your tube straight.
    Once you've rolled the entire strip apply a line of glue under the loose end of it. Smooth it down until it stays put. If all went well and you didn't get too much glue all over your rolling stick the tube-to-be will slide right off. Be careful with it. Until the glue dries it will be soft and easily deformed. Put it someplace safe and allow it to dry for twelve hours before you use it for anything. While the glue is still wet the tube can be cut and the ends trimmed square with a utility knife. Once the glue dries the tube will be hard and solid and you will need a hacksaw to cut through it.
    Pyros who value their time may find it helpful to roll big giant tubes and cut them down to shorter lengths later. It's up to you. Dried tubes make excellent salute casings, rocket casings, and launch tubes (obviously depending on size).

    And all it cost you was some time.

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