Our first experimental of burning a reconstructed medieval pitch garland (fire crown, quoit; German: Pechkranz) on 4. May 2014. The pitch garland was made of a ring of straw, bandaged with nitrated linnen and coated with tar and sulfur, covered by second winding of linnen with tar powdered with charcoal dust. It was built according to descriptions in medieval fireworks books such as Martin Merz: Büchsenmeisterbuch, South Germany 1420. The experiment did not meet our expectations and proved some constructional fault as it took too long until the pitch garland starts burning after igniting the match and its burning time was too long and the flames and smoke emission was too harmless.
Here a link zu a short video on youtube
http://youtu.be/JRIv19BFubA
The following image shows the highlit of the test.