Altar Elijah

Whatever you do with the information in this post;

NEVER USE GASOLINE IN SOMETHING LIKE THIS

Since such a theater takes a while, the gasoline has more than enough time to evaporate enough to cause an uncontrollable explosion/fireball.

Test the individual components of the whole thing individually so that you know how it will behave. It is a complex process that will take some time. However, if enough time is spent on preparation and testing, it will pay off.

Once the altar is burning, it can no longer be extinguished and burns out with stones, as mentioned in the Bible.

Depending on the forest fire danger level, this is not feasible,

Depending on the canton, you would (theoretically) need a permit to burn something like this.

Prologue

At a regional Pentecost camp, we had the theme of Elijah and of course the prophet showdown at the altar was part of it. Intensive preparations were made to test different approaches to such an altar. The best way was then carried out and it was a huge success.

Materials

All material is available without special licenses. Depending on how good your connections are, you can borrow a lot of it or get it as a donation.

Consumables

8 jute bags 60x110 = 50.-

3 Talon igniter clips 5m = 12.-

4 Talon lighter clips 2m = 7.-

6l lighter fluid =25.-

1l fuel =3.-

1 disposable pallet = 0.-

Colors

4 AA batteries

Wooden sticks

Intermediate layer = Individual

Sacrifice = Individual

Water

Cling film

Fuse 18 cm = if new coil has to be bought 20.-

Adhesive tape

several match packs (for ignition tape)= 5.-

Reusable material

Pressure atomizer = 25.-

Remote igniter 4 channel = 40.-

Theater material

2.Altar for Baal priest

Water bucket

possibly small loudspeaker system

Possible rind boards

Structure of the altar in its components:

first the sacrifice and wood

then a water-repellent intermediate layer

then come the 'stones'

in the stones it has the ignition mechanisms

At the bottom a disposable pallet and floor protection

Component of the whole

Altar stones

In the story, the entire altar burns with stones. We make use of this. We use jute sacks (available from certain coffee shops, or ask farmers for large potato sacks, or simply buy them in Jumbo) filled with dry pine shavings. Tie/knot a little string around the middle of each of the filled jute sacks to make them look like 2 stones. Do not fill them to the brim so that every space is filled. Just stuff them in loosely until they hold their shape and can withstand enough strain. Organize at least 7 bags for this. 6 for the altar and one to test out different things.

How the stones are stacked will be discussed later, but this is also important to test.

The jute sacks can be colored. As we still attached great importance to environmental friendliness, we didn't paint them, but I regretted it afterwards. I would use spray cans or try to color them, but this is a point (like all others) where you should test how the whole thing behaves in terms of fire and spray water. It is important that only the fabric of the jute bags is colored/painted and the pores in between remain open, as it is very important that enough air can get to it so that the fire gets enough oxygen and does not suffocate.

On site, ~1h before the theater, the altar is then covered with ignition liquid and sprayed over the entire surface. This is important for testing. However, the colors used should also be dry and hardened.

Testing:

When the altar is set up;

we started the program 1.5 hours before the theater and started preparing the lighting agent 1 hour before the theater. If you want to start this preparation earlier, you must also allow the firelighters to take effect and test them during the tests.

Before the theater, the entire outer surface of the altar, especially the jute bags, is generously sprayed with kindling liquid from the outside using a pressure sprayer. In addition, the stones are directly doused with ~3 liters of kindling. The aim of the duster is to ensure that the entire surface is well wetted, making the outer layer of the jute bags more water-repellent. We make use of this several times, as the lighting fluid (at least the one from the Landi) is based on oil/paraffin and repels water.

Also test how you want to stack the stones. We stacked them 2 next to each other (see picture). We fixed them in place by pushing thin wooden sticks through several bags at a time.

When testing with water, make sure that ideally only splash water touches the bags, but if something goes wrong, it should be able to withstand a good splash in one place.

Note: I sprinkled a little cement powder on the whole thing afterwards (only when setting up in front of the theater and during the tests), but this didn't make any difference visually, I wouldn't recommend it.

If a little water gets on the bags, then there is water vapor, which makes it look more spectacular. In this sense, water is not all bad, but should still be avoided because of the ignition mechanisms

Water-repellent layer.

If you want to do it right, then pour real water over it. You should then give the children a taste of this, otherwise they won't believe you. However, we want to avoid the water getting on the jute sacks or even our fuses (if water gets on the fuse it will not ignite). That's why we need a water-impermeable layer on our stones, so that when the water is tipped onto the wood and the victim, it is drained away and can run off outside.

We have done this by means of a veneer layer (veneer is very thin wood 1mm thick (had a carpenter from a young team create a 1x1m panel and stapled it to a small frame. (I then 'oiled' this veneer with kindling liquid 1 hour before the start of the theater so that it would not absorb any/significantly less water. However, this was relatively tedious as it was rather brittle and we had to patch it up a bit with adhesive tape. For the next time, I would test whether a sufficiently large piece of cardboard (1 hour before the start of the theater) sprayed/fully saturated with ignition fluid is sufficiently water-repellent and dimensionally stable. Or pour hot wax over it and soak it. If you don't care about the environment, you could also use cling film or varnish to create a waterproof intermediate layer.

You should also consider whether you want to match the color of the intermediate layer (and test how it interacts with water and everything else).

The intermediate layer may absorb a little water, it primarily serves to drain off the water that is poured onto it in buckets.

Testing:

As always, testing is necessary, but please bear in mind that a little absorbed water is not a bad thing. We start the fire by the jute sacks/'stones', so the heat comes from below. Therefore, test the material held horizontally, flat, in the middle of the material (=do not test at the edge), with a direct flame from below, after it has been treated and doused with water (always test with the same amount/more water than is actually needed). If you use cardboard, test the whole thing with pieces as large as you will need to test the dimensional stability. Jute bags can be kept dry in large garbage bags.

This intermediate layer should not be too dense, as the heat acts on the surface and has to burn through it. I therefore consider fretsaw wood to be unrealistic. Otherwise you will only burn off the stones, it will collapse and the victim will remain unharmed.

Sacrifice and wood

Paste together any kind of sacrifice (it must not be solid inside = if stuffed, then only with loose balls of paper), paint it and then spray it with kindling liquid on site, take small logs and spray them with kindling liquid on site too, or oil them in advance.

Test:

As long as the sacrificial animal is hollow/not full to bursting and the intermediate layer burns through quickly, there is nothing to test.

Inflammatory mechanism

This is the most important and trickiest part.

Buy/rent an ignition system with 4 channels from someone. You will also need igniters. In Switzerland, those with black powder in them are not available for normal people. Bear this in mind if you buy something from abroad. It is therefore best to buy Talon fuse clips, which do not contain black powder and are available to normal people. It is best to buy 3 5 meter long and a few 2 meter long ones to test. There are good explanatory videos that show how to connect them. Use these Talon clips to light a fuse. Note that this fuse must not get wet under any circumstances, and avoid contact with other liquids as well, otherwise it will no longer ignite. Therefore, use the shortest possible lengths of fuse ~3cm for the altar.

Fuse directly into a vessel with methylated spirits does not ignite the methylated spirits. You must therefore use your fuse to ignite an ignition band. You can make this yourself with ground up match heads and adhesive tape.

Take some matchboxes, crush their heads with flat-nose pliers and collect the pieces of match head. Then take a mortar, or simply a crusher, and grind the whole thing into as fine a powder as possible and store it safely in a small preserving jar. Take a ~12cm long piece of parcel tape, which you carefully cut with scissors to get a flat piece of tape and place it on the table with the sticky side up. if it sticks to your finger, you can press it on the table with a pencil (pencil tip) and free your finger, fortunately the graphite does not stick to the tape. Now take a piece of fuse about 4 cm in size. Imagine an imaginary line lengthwise in the middle of the tape. with 2 cm distance to the edge, make your piece of fuse perpendicular to the line just imagined, make 3 mm distance to this line and place the piece of fuse on the tape. now the fuse should protrude ~2 cm from the side of the tape. Now fold a piece of paper into a V and put a little match powder on it (the paper is there for targeted dosing). Now spread this powder on the imaginary line, putting a little more powder at the contact point with the fuse and keeping a distance of ~2cm from the edges. You should now have a fine line in the middle of the tape. Now fold it very carefully lengthwise. The best way to do this is to hold your index fingers in the middle of the tape at both edges so that the tape sticks to your fingers and adapts a little to the curvature of your fingers. now you can carefully press the whole thing together with the rest of your fingers, free your fingers and press all the way around. you must work carefully, especially with the fuse. If you work too frantically, your line will wobble and spread across the tape. where it spreads, the tape will no longer stick together and you can practically start again. (You can use it for testing, but I wouldn't otherwise.

You can then partially place this ignition band in a bowl of methylated spirits. If you are thinking of using an old pan, it should be uncoated, and if it is made of aluminum, it will be melted afterwards (yes, we did this). I carefully put the ignition tape in each time and then left it alone, but think it might be useful to secure this with a woody tapper.

Testing:

Be sure to test the whole thing with the ignition and everything a few times, even if it doesn't work, make the fuse a little wet with water or methylated spirits, you don't always have to use a Talon clip, but you should do some tests with Talon clips to see how they behave. You can also test the range of the remote control on remote ignition systems without using Talon clips. The models I know of have lights that go out during ignition and then come back on. If you don't have this, you can also test it with a voltmeter. When carrying out these tests, also consider how you will hide the receiver on site.

One-way pallet and floor protection

The main function of the one-way pallet is to make air accessible from below. This is drawn in by the chimney effect. Disposable pallets can easily be obtained free of charge from various industrial companies. However, as these pallets are usually destroyed immediately, it is best to ask early enough whether they can store the next one.

Ground protection;

If it is done on a meadow, it is advisable to generously cover the ground around the entire altar with rind boards to protect it a little.

Never do it on tar, it will melt and it will be expensive.

Gravel paths tend to be harmless

Avoid nice gravel areas made with clean even gravel.

Since we produce so much heat, concrete areas should also be avoided.

Fermacell is often used for fire bowls to protect tarred areas from the heat. We work with much higher temperatures here, which are directly on the slab at the end of the fire. If so, then steel plates and other combinations of materials would have to be used, but that is beyond my experience. And the worst thing that could happen to you is that some building material gets so hot that it releases toxic smoke, which then requires a large-scale emergency response.

Location and safety

The right location is very important so that the whole thing can be carried out safely. Either there should be no wind or a light wind away from the audience.

Do not place the whole thing on a tarred area/tarred road, it will melt away and a concrete area will also suffer visible damage.

Use a gravel surface/meadow (*if a meadow, protect it with boards under a pallet). Keep a distance of at least 10m from buildings and trees

Think about how you can safely hide the igniter cables. A meadow/ roadside of a gravel path is ideal, as you can bury the ugly orange cables that give the trick away a little, although digging is almost too big a word. Draw a line in the ground with a stick, place the cable on it and press it closed with your finger.

-if the soil is too dry to lay the cable in this way, the soil seems to be too dry anyway, so wet it out early enough.

Also think about how you want to hide the remote ignition receiver. We had simply packed it under a cardboard box at the edge of the path where there were some ladders (no child noticed).

Think about emergency scenarios and how you would act. We had a symbolic fire extinguisher on site, but the whole thing is that once the altar is on fire, it cannot be extinguished and has to burn down and you have to be more careful (unless you have firefighters on site and ready with a hose) about what could be ignited by flying sparks (which there shouldn't be).

Make a safety concept and inform the entire theater team, camp management and a few more leaders how to proceed and when. (Keeping a safe distance is pretty important, but having someone to call the fire brigade/ambulance would be an advantage and having the addresses/coordinates ready.

Determine a safe distance from participants to altar and ladders to altar. Fire grows slowly, so theater players have enough time to build up the necessary distance. We did 5m.

Set-up procedure on site.

Meet with the theater team, discuss everything through safety concept, amount of water over altar, distance between participants, distance between leaders, fire develops relatively slowly ~40 seconds to very large. it is best to do a dry run of the theater so that everyone knows when they have to do what.

Also determine who is the victim with the Bunsen burner in case it doesn't ignite.

(if you do it properly, the biggest danger is that you don't have fully charged batteries or forget to switch on the receiver. do the multi-eye principle there and take a brand new pack of quality batteries)

Take your disposable pallet and place it, if you can't reposition it with Palettrolli, you can already place it at the burnout location. Put the 'stones' on it, fix the construction as you have tested it. Now pour a generous ~3 liters of ignition liquid onto the whole thing and let it seep through.

Take a pressure sprayer and spray the intermediate layer on both sides with ignition fluid and place it on top of the stones. Make sure that this layer is not flat on top, but has a slight slope so that the water can drain away.

Now spray the surfaces of the jute bags with ~1.5 - 2 liters of lighting fluid.

If not already done, it is now best to place the pallet in its final burning location. Place the wood on it and, depending on the theater, the victim (depends on the theater), the victim does not necessarily have to be sprayed. Now you can simply make more ignition liquid directly from the bottle for good measure.

Now come the ignition mechanisms.

Carefully cut a slit in the back of a sack with a sack knife. Carefully insert your container filled with fuel and then insert the ignition tape and connect it to the Talon igniter. Protect the whole thing from possible water from above by putting a piece of cling film over the igniter and fuse (it's a fiddle, doesn't have to look nice). Now do this with the other remote detonators. We deliberately use more than one here in case one or two get wet and don't light.

Make sure that the ignition cables do not run visibly through the whole thing. And come out at the bottom of the pallet. If you are afraid of tripping over them, you can carefully tie them to the pallet, but I would not. Now lay the cables, if they are slightly buried you can already do this.

Insert NEW batteries into the remote igniter and check, without a cable connected, whether the signal from the remote control reaches the remote igniter from your ignition location. (A light will go out quickly at the selected channel on the receiver, and then come on again) Now switch off the receiver, connect the cables and make sure that the remote control is safe.

Have someone else look at the whole thing, scrutinize it and then switch the ignition system back on.

Instruct the theater team again, determine a safe distance together and clarify any open questions. Discuss the theater again. Discuss the amount of water to be poured on the whole thing. Do it as often as written in the Bible, it can withstand a good 1 liter of water per scoop if it is built sturdily enough.

The water is poured onto the water-repellent surface with momentum so that all the water practically slides over it and has hardly any chance of flowing down the edge.

Make (if possible) a dry run of the theater.

Now it is advisable to pray and hand over the lead to the theater team.

Theater procedure:

We had Elijah wired up and a narrator on a sound system, with epic background music that was dynamically controlled

according to the Bible; Elijah asks priests of Baal to summon their god to set their sacrifice on the altar on fire...

Baal priests become increasingly hysterical, begin to scratch themselves (can be depicted with red cloths)

Elijah teases them...

It's ELia's turn, orders 3 times 4 buckets of water to be emptied.

take the water from the same water source and let some children try it!

Pour the buckets with a (sideways) swing onto the water-repellent layer so that it washes over them and actually spits down again straight away.

Elijah prays

-Ignite all 3, staggered, to make sure that at least one ignites while praying. if it smokes and hisses briefly, it should work.

nothing will be recognizable for a while, but then it will come slowly.

within 40 seconds it will be ablaze

As soon as it burns, Baal priests are chased away/chased/chased. So make a video of the whole thing so the extras can watch it afterwards.

Ideas that should be avoided

Diesel would probably work instead of lighter fluid. DO NOT USE GASOLINE WHEN YOU DO THIS TEST! (Because it evaporates and therefore cannot be controlled. There have been serious accidents because of such actions!) Even if it looks great, such explosive jet flames are a matter for trained people who do this professionally.

Even if it seems great that the whole thing ignites as soon as you pour water on it (e.g. with lithium), this is simply dangerous. It can ignite spontaneously due to the humidity in the air or on contact with the skin. Often these reactions can also be explosive. If the program has to be aborted, there is also no way to dismantle the whole thing safely.

For one thing, it is difficult to heat the oil to the right temperature and keep it warm during the theater. In addition, such a container cannot burn, so it is not biblical for the entire altar to burn with stones. Moreover, it is not biblical anyway, as it would only ignite during prayer, and it is difficult to control anyway, making it a catastrophic idea in terms of safety.

Emptying fuel on something potentially already burning/hot is something else that should be avoided. As it is in the air, it has a larger surface area and ignites explosively. This has already led to many nasty accidents with fondue pots.

Tests in themselves are not bad, as long as they are approached with respect. Only do what you feel safe with.