Fireworks Rack Setup

Building Fireworks Racks

We secure racks by “cleating” them together. What the heck is cleating?! It’s quite simple actually. It involves taking a few pieces of wood (cleats) and nailing them to the racks. The name of the game is to make the racks stable. Watch one of our videos of fireworks mortars firing during a show, a finale in particular, you can see it’s extremely violent. So your cleating job has to ensure that the racks will not tip over or come apart while they’re jumping around. If your cleating an individual rack, or even two of them together, you will take one cleat across the bottom of the rack, making sure it is sitting firmly on the ground, and place two nails (in each rack if more than one are being cleated together) and then one cleat across the top (if more than one are being put together), with one nail in each rack. So, two nails in the bottom of each rack and one in the top of each rack. We use duplex nails (nails with two heads) so that we can pull the nails out with ease at the end of the show during cleanup. Finale racks are slightly different since they are usually cleated together at an angle (like a fan) so that you get a good spread and fill the whole sky. The same cleating method applies (two nails in the bottom, one in the top), with the one difference of fanning.