By now, I'm probably more famous for my disaster on the fourth live-round competition on AGT than for anything else.  Several days after the disaster, I still am not 100% what went wrong, but have a pretty good idea.

Occasionally, I have gadgets lock up in one or two places and have to tap it with a stick to get it going.  However, last Tuesday's debacle was different in that the stick bomb locked up everywhere as if the sticks were glued to the floor (there was some truth to Howie's assertion that I shouldn't use glue).  Humidity causes sticks to lose energy and sitting for a long time also causes the sticks to lose their springiness.  But I've NEVER seen sticks that simply refused to jump at all.

About a week before I sent the sticks off to Hollywood (I said 'month' on the show, but I was nervous), I re-painted all 10,600 of my sticks with acrylic paint.  Not just one coat, but multiple coats to get the sticks--which were painted in different batches with different paints--to all have a uniform color.  This increased the surface friction greatly.  I always thought friction was my friend with stick bombs as they keep the sticks from spontaneously detonating, but I wonder if too much friction is a bad idea.  Also, I don't the sticks hadn't thoroughly dried out from the painting when I started weaving them and they didn't have as much snap to them.

I'm still not certain if it was just the paint, or an unholy mixture of paint, humidity, heat, and time.  I threw out all my tongue depressors, except for a few which I want to test thoroughly.  When I color the next batch, I'm probably going with water colors or some sort of wood stain after doing a test batch.  I also plan to let the sticks dry for several weeks before using them.

Finally, I'm going to re-think how I do stick bombs.  If I'm creating a stick bomb for a live audience, I'll probably keep it small to reduce the time for weaving so the sticks don't warp too much.  Bigger stick bombs will have to wait until they're made in a video studio to give me the luxury of doing re-takes.  Until then, any big gadget will probably be done with my other techniques until I get a very precise undertanding of what went wrong...