Making black powder?

[texaswoodworker]

For those of you who make your own black powder, how well does it work? Does it produce good accuracy and power? Is the fouling soft? How does it compare to Goex or Swiss?

I'd like to try my hand at making it if it's at least as good as some of the cheaper store bought stuff. How do you guys make it? I found this article that does a good job of explaining the process, but the tools he's using add up to quite a bit and I don't need to make that much powder at once (yet). Is there a method that would produce a smaller amount of powder for me to try, without having to invest that much money into making my own?

http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/showthread.php?t=405941

[Ballistics in Scotland]

It does a medium job. I must first admit I haven't made it since the inevitable childhood experiments, and don't have any plans to. But it is a fascinating subject.

I don't believe any commercially sold powder of good quality has ever been granulated by screening. People who do it that way report an improvement in performance if they compress it into a cartridge case, but normal practice is to compress slightly damp powder into a hard cake about the size of an ice-hockey puck, which is broken up when dry. Some kind of device with toothed rollers, which you can set a specific distance apart, will produce the least wastage. But you just return excessively small grains to the process.

That apart, the most important factor in making good black powder is the extreme intimacy with which you incorporate the ingredients. All of these need to be in a finer particle size than you can buy. Hence the ball mill, but you can do the same, for small quantities, with a non-sparking pestle and mortar. You can grind the sulphur and charcoal together, because they, in the intended combustion, receive oxygen. It is grinding or incorporating one or both of them together with the oxygen-supplying saltpeter that is dangerous, and needs to be done wet.

In the past incorporation was done by edge runner mills, with very large cast iron rollers on a circular cast iron bed. Tou can see them in the following website. The mixture had to be damp, and even so the danger wasn't totally absent. I think it took the form of small amounts being expelled where they could dry out, and if they got ignited, the main doughy mass would burn - less rapidly than when dry, but a lot more rapidly than you would want. I believe in Brazil they have recently taken to having the floor of the incorporating house awash with shallow water.

http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/ICIArdeer

The good news is that you don't need a triple beam balance. Any kitchen scale is good enough. The proportion of ingredients used to be varied for special purposes, such as cannon, quarrying powder etc., and those people are losing more energy by screen granulation than you could lose by a percent or two on ingredients.

Not all charcoals are alike. Soft woods (as against softwoods) are indeed best, although that may only be because hardwood charcoal is still hard, and more difficult to reach the right particle size. Dogwood and alder were considered excellent but are in short supply now, so willow is the obvious candidate, but it doesn't have to weep. If I was doing it in the UK I would ask cricket-bat makers what they do with their offcuts. The true softwoods (i.e. evergreen trees) are so cheap and abundant that there must be some good reason why they weren't used, probably involving the resin. Thorough debarking is important, especially for the muzzle-loading shooting, as the bark can form lingering sparks.

WW Greener, in "The Gun and Its Development" says that the brown charcoal produced at 500ºF ignites at a much lower temperature than that made at high temperature, which barbecue charcoal may well be. He doesn't mention the energy content being different, but this sounds particularly important for the flintlock user.

Now this is conjecture... The formulae for black powder combustion usually assumes that it is a simple supply of oxygen to carbon and sulphur, yielding copious quantities of the carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases you want, plus the potassium sulphate and carbonate fouling which you don't. But this is not the case. You couldn't make effective powder with pure carbon. Your car gets its fuel and its oxygen separately and mixes them on the spot. Nitrocellulose or a high explosive has oxygen and the substance that will end up oxidized in a single molecule. The conventional wisdom is that black powder is like the gasoline and air, with its oxygen and fuel in separate particles which are, if you have done things properly, just a micron or two apart. But I think the brown, low-temperature charcoal does contain some oxygen and combustible material, still in the complex molecules of wood.

You could insert a digital thermometer to the charcoal-making container, and a cheap eBay infra-red thermometer pointed at the thing would probably be good enough. You do need to do this outdoors, and burn off what is actually creosote vapor, a seriously antisocial substance. A simple stainless steel pot would be as good as a pressure cooker, for it isn't like a rubber seal is going to last at that temperature.

I think the website poster is wrong in saying that black powder, properly stored, is liable to spontaneous combustion. Just look at how much of it gets stored, in canisters and cartridges... and how few slightly singed people really want to admit doing something stupid. I've experimented with the piezo igniter from a defunct gas torch, and found a neat little spark jumping to a powder grain doesn't ignite it. But I wouldn't use an open powder container to push open the door of my office, which regularly gives me a static shock. I'd only store it in tin canisters, or plastic ones made for powder, after carefully removing the smokeless labels.

I would use steel balls or cylinders in the ball mill, not lead. Finely powdered lead in the mix will melt on firing, and render the fouling more tenacious. The danger of ball milling isn't great, but that is good advice about doing it from a distance, outdoors. I would be very wary of making powder in a jurisdiction which forbids or licences it, and even outdoor ball milling offers a very slight chance of getting spectacularly caught. Even a cop who sympathises and doesn't specially want to read up a lot of regulations on something that isn't exactly going to catch on, may not have much choice with a lot of angry neighbours watching him.

[texaswoodworker]

Neighbors and laws are non issues here. :D

Willow is not exactly something I could pick up at the local hardware store. I found a place that sells willow charcoal for $8 per pound, plus $18 shipping. Alder might be easier to get a hold of to turn into charcoal.

How about Poplar? It's characteristics looks to be pretty similar to Alder and Willow. I can get a big board of that relatively cheaply.

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/poplar/

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/red-alder/

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/white-willow/

[Whiterabbit]

For those of you who make your own black powder:

-how well does it work?
-Does it produce good accuracy and power?
-Is the fouling soft?
-How does it compare to Goex or Swiss?

-How do you guys make it? Is there a method that would produce a smaller amount of powder for me to try, without having to invest that much money into making my own?

My experience is very limited, but as a very new person to making black powder:

-It works when you get the granulation right, and the proportions right. Getting these things right is about as easy as getting the proportions of ingredients right to make a good chocolate chip cookie, or a good lead alloy. (aka you can't wing it, but you don't need scientific grade instrumentation)

- My feeble first attempts require 120 grains down the bore to approach what 90 does with goex, and never you mind about the horizontal, only pay attention to the vertical:
http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/fss/825719cc4c66ce7657108332ca965087
It's probably a smidge slower than my 90 grain load. Given that my 90 grain goex load is a 58 caliber roundball cruising along at 1700 fps, I'm not worried about a lack of power. Additionally, you can see that I can lose about 10 grains of powder somewhere and it does not appreciably impact the accuracy (I'm guessing that last 10 grains is just burning out the barrel after the ball is long gone?)

-So. The fouling is soft.... but compared to goex, my black powder fouls like crazy. patches come out amazingly gunked up. Soft! ...but wow.

-Compared to goex, seems comparable, but oddly, the recoil is far worse. Noticeable. Swiss gives a stronger crack during the report, goex and my homemade are quieter. This is all a smidge beyond anecdotal in unreliableness, so keep that in mind.


How do I make it? cheaply, I am cheap. How to make it without investing a ton? like this:

Ball mill: harbor freight plus 25% off coupon. Dual drum. One drum with 1lb of stainless pins for tumbling, one drum for ball milling.
Balls: we all own roundball molds. Whatever you got is good. Cast a bunch in hardball or linotype, somewhere in there. That's your milling balls.
Chemicals: Cast boolits for charcoal. I got my initial KNO3 from home depot. Sulfur from a chemical supply house (you can get sulphur from home depot too but it is not pure and REALLY attracts water). Other than my charcoal, I'm NOT using ideal chemicals here.
Grading screens: they cost $6 a piece from grainger for 12"x12" stainless steel. Forget that $140 set. I bought two of each size for 1F to 4F for less than 50 bucks and made my own wood frames. I even sunk magnets into them so they align nicely and 'stick'.
Process: I ball mill each chemical to air-float and store in yogurt tubs. then I pull out the kitchen scale and measure each ingredient individually to the proportion I use, then into the ball mill. Then ball mill again for a few hours. Dump into another yogurt container, add a LITTLE water, then put into the compression die and press in the bench vise (because I am too cheap to buy the $80 harbor freight 6 ton hydraulic press). Let dry for a week (aka go back to work) then crush in a mortar with a pestle and grade. Because I am lazy, I mix all my 2f and 3f and put maybe 20-30% of the 1F in there too.

--------------------

BIG NOTE:

Take my results with a grain of salt. Remember when you started reloading and did all sorts of things wrong. That's me now. That's me loading a cartridge for the first time using a shot-in-the-dark recipe and checking for accuracy. Read: there is room for lots of improvement! I need pyrotechnics grade KNO3. I need lab grade sulfur. I need a better compression press. I'm not worried about my grading mix.

So, despite all these "failures" of protocol, you can see that I can get decently close to my point of impact with my competition charge of commercial powder, maintain decent vertical accuracy (never you mind that horizontal in the pic), and well, cleaning is a pain. Maybe that'll change with time.

-S

(cliff's notes: go out and do it. make your own powder. try it. It's hard to fail.)

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Did you mean you tumble all three ingredients together dry? I would not do that... You could make a perfectly adequate press for this work with a cheap Chinese hydraulic jack, a couple of piece of steel plate and four long, heavy bolts.

[Fishman]

There are two stickies in this section dealing with bp making and component sourcing. Lots of ways to accomplish it

[OverMax]

How to go about making B/P {Its kind of a long drawn out process to do it > right!} My suggestion: Watch this fellow on Utube (link) He'll teach you the most basic way on how its done. Then read the Sticky's above in this C/B (Muzzle Loading) column to gather even more enlightenment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKB8c4VLbw0

[ofitg]

Texaswoodworker, what type of gun do you plan to load with the homemade BP? The video linked by OverMax is a good way to get started, and the biggest expense would be the rock tumbler from Harbor Freight.

Compressing powder into dense, hard pucks (described by Ballistics_In_Scotland) was an innovation introduced in the 1800s. Prior to that time, un-compressed BP was used in all manner of firearms.

If you're planning to load BP cartridges, the compressed (high density) BP would provide the greatest weight/energy within the cartridge case's volume constraints.

If you're planning on using a muzzle-loader, the un-compressed BP (per OverMax's video) might be all you need.

[Boz330]

Read the stickies, everything you need to know is there. I grind all of my ingredients at the same time, about 4oz outside. I have taken 3 deer with my powder so far and use it exclusively for hunting. 2 with a BPCR and 1 with a ML
When I first started making it I shot it in competition for grins and giggles but vertical variation at 300yd and 500yd was to much to deal with. In my Gibbs rifle recoil was brutal for long shot strings.
For Charcoal I've been using tree of heaven and it has worked well for me. I gives me about 50fps more than black willow.

Bob

[Texantothecore]

This thread will get you going:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?185261-DIY-bp-gurus-will-I-need-to-corn-my-black-powder-for-use-in-cartrides

In addtion read the sticky on bp making and you should be quite knowledgeable in the subject.

[Geezer in NH]

Cheaper and less hassle to BUY

[Texantothecore]

Cheaper and less hassle to BUY

When you can find it. I have not been able find bp for quite a while.

Reasons to make your own powder:
Consistent supply
About 2.25 per lb to make
The joy of rolling your own.
If you are close to retirement the thought of paying today's prices for ammo or components means that at retirement time one's shooting will decrease dramatically. Not acceptable.

All good and true reasons for making your own powder.

[Texantothecore]

Neighbors and laws are non issues here. :D

Willow is not exactly something I could pick up at the local hardware store. I found a place that sells willow charcoal for $8 per pound, plus $18 shipping. Alder might be easier to get a hold of to turn into charcoal.

How about Poplar? It's characteristics looks to be pretty similar to Alder and Willow. I can get a big board of that relatively cheaply.

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/poplar/

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/red-alder/

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/white-willow/

Poplar will certainly work as willow and alder are part of poplar family. Western cedar is also good and is available at Lowes or home depot in the form of fence slats. An 8 foot slat will fill a paint can which is my charcoal producing tool.

[Boz330]

Cheaper and less hassle to BUY

Less hassle, yes, cheaper NO.
I've always been a DIY kind of guy, use to do all of my own car repairs back when you could actually find the engine. Remodeled my first house built my second house, built several guns and cast my own boolits. Made BP when I was a kid although it wasn't very good so it was a natural for me. Is it as consistent as store bought for competition, not yet but that is probably a matter of perfecting the process. It is good enough for hunting and I can't tell the difference at 100yd and the small and lg game that I have taken with it sure couldn't tell any difference.
There has also been an attempt to limit the access to BP in the last 10 years which thank God was unsuccessful but who knows how long that will last with things like the Boston bombing having gone on. My first BP was made with stump remover and accounted for 1 pretty nice deer.
I sure understand if you don't want to make it, but some folks just have to do things for themselves because it is a challenge.

Bob

[Texantothecore]

Cheaper and less hassle to BUY

When I started the project to make my own powder my intent was to expend an amount equal to or less than one case of Swiss on all equipment required to process bp. I decided to go with a more expensive ball mill and exceeded that cost objective by 100.00 or so. The payback time is going to be short, probably less than a year as I am going to be providing family of ten nieces and nephews with the black powder experience. Plus a brand new grand daughter.

So I will be going through a lot of bp over the next twenty years or so.

I have found a great deal of satisfaction in making it. Interesting chemistry and physics.

[dondiego]

Cheaper and less hassle to BUY


I can certainly tell that you have never made any.

[Texantothecore]

I make it. Once you get the process going it goes pretty quickly.

Take look at the thread which starts "Diy bp gurus". It is a rather full examination of the process of making bp and is more of a process document than a discussion.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

It depends how much you make. If it is a lot, the fixed costs are spread over a lot of powder. If you make only a little, they aren't.

I once made a gemstone polisher which consisted simply of a large plastic drum floating on its side in water, and connected by a piece of flexible hose from the centre of the lid to the spindle of a geared motor. It would presumably eliminate a static charge. There would have to be some sort of paddle on the inside to make sure it didn't simply slip round its contents, leaving them in an immobile mass.

Another possibility, to leave conveniently away from your person in the event of an explosion, would be a wind powered tumbler. It would have to be geared, to avoid having the contents held to the sides by centrifugal force, but there is no shortage of plastic gears on eBay.

Static electricity is a funny thing. I once experimented with the piezo igniter from a defunct blowtorch, and found out that I could strike a tiny arc to a coarse powder grain without igniting it. But when you don't want to might be different.

[Fly]

Man there is more info above in the sticky thread on making bp than anywhere on the net.
It may take you a while to read, but after reading you can know a lot. Brush Hippie video,s on
YouTube are very good also. Just type in brush hippie on the Youtube main board & you will find it.

Brush has some very well done Videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKB8c4VLbw0 is
part one & there a part two on screen powder. He also has one on corning & pressing black
powder with one of the dies I make.

Fly

[irishtoo]

is there a documented case where someone making blackpowder blew themselfs up? documented? irishtoo

[Texantothecore]

is there a documented case where someone making blackpowder blew themselfs up? documented? irishtoo

The only ones that I am aware of are rocket builders who make their own propellant. Not sure why. No actual explosions but the makers were burned because they were right on top of a can of it when it lit off.

The bp in an open container will burn suddenly rather than exploding. You have to enclose it in something before it becomes explosive.

Safety rules:

Store powder in closed containers: paint cans will pop open with very little pressure from the inside. Maybe 3 or 4 lbs.

Bench grinders and welding torches need to be kept off until you have your powder in a can and covered.

No smoking in the garage.

Bp requires 801 fahrenheit to light off. The above sources are about the only sources I can think of that would generate that heat.

Basically any tool which would spark when used.

[Fly]

The above post pretty much sums it up. Yes it must be enclosed to explode.
But commend sense prevails as far as safety like any thing. No sparks, excess heat
& your good to go. People have been shooting & handling BP for hundreds of
years with out problems. But do it reasonably & not a problem.

Fly

[waksupi]

is there a documented case where someone making blackpowder blew themselfs up? documented? irishtoo

How about GOEX and several other manufacturers blowing up over the years?

[Texantothecore]

How about GOEX and several other manufacturers blowing up over the years?

Those are rare and have been usually due to a fire in the plant, an engine catching fire, etc.

Your garage won't be shooting sparks like a plant.

[Fly]

How about GOEX and several other manufacturers blowing up over the years?

Well who really knows for sure. Employees sneak off & smoke when they should not. People get complacent &
carless & BAM! Just think how long most here have been shooting & handling BP. That's a lot of folks & how many
have ever seen it explode in all that time out of a gun???
JMOHOP, Fly

[irishtoo]

is there a documented case where someone making blackpowder blew themselfs up? documented? irishtoo
that is why i asked my question. with the attitude of the naysayers, as soon as you have a thought of making bp, you explode.

[Fly]

that is why i asked my question. with the attitude of the naysayers, as soon as you have a thought of making bp, you explode.

Yea, & boy do I know that. I have been making it for many years. When I first started posting how to make it, I got run off web sites
& even when I was allowed to post on this it was a fight from the word go. But the more the word got out & people started making
it, then it became more & more excepted.

This form has been great at letting us work things out between us & the naysayers.

Fly

[Vann]

Last year I made a few pounds and tested it by loading it into 45 Colt cartridges and shooting it over my chronograph. What I found was that it's not very hard to make, homemade b/p can shoot just as well as store bought b/p, but if you're not using several pounds a year it's not going to save you any money. Power wise it performs fine, in fact after I did my testing in the 45 Colt, the remainder of my trial batches was loaded into b/p shotgun shells and used at the monthly cowboy shoot. Nobody could tell the difference between my normal b/p shotgun shells and the homemade b/p shotgun shells.

It performed well enough that I am planning on making more and using it to supplement my existing powder stash. Accuracy wise, all of the shots were fired at 25 yards and where acceptable for my purpose. The amount of fouling is greatly dependant on the charcoal used and the method used to corn the powder. A ball mill is a must have also I recommend a coffee grinder for mixing and grinding ingredients.
The powder can be pushed through a screen to corn it, but you will have much better quality powder IMHO if its pressed into pucks and run through a homemade powder grinding mill.

As far as safety is concerned, it's safe until you start mixing the ingredients together after that I won't let it come back into my loading room unless it's kept wet or it's a finished batch in cans. I store my homemade powder in used metal Goex cans. Thats about the only way I feel comfortable with it. I do strongly suggest that pvc not be used for any part of making b/p due to the fact that if something does go south xrays can't find it.

[OverMax]

For what ever reason if someone doesn't care to try their hand at making B/P. That's fine and dandy. But there are others who do and enjoy the rewards such practice brings. Like reloading, casting, paper patching, powder coating, and whatever else it too (B/P making) is just another facet of our hobby.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

There are certainly plenty of people ready to hysterically overrate the risks. It is mostly a matter of common sense precautions. But lots of powder mill explosions weren't due to fires, smoking etc. WW Greener wrote in 1910 that accidents, sometimes unexplained, were inevitable in the incorporation process. Edge-runner mills were the main cause, and accidents were actually commoner in the days of power by water, steam from distant boilers, or non-sparking horses.

For this reason 60 pounds was (and possibly still is) the maximum charge that could be incorporated in a single mill, by British law. Greener considered that 100 pounds might be safer, as it reduced contact between the rollers and their bed, which by his time were usually cast-iron in both cases. The walls were usually thin boards or felt on a wooden framework, a blast reduction measure which would have been counterproductive with flames. 40 gallon cisterns of water were supported over all the incorporating mills in a factory, and liked so that all the mills could be inundated if one ignited. When you consider the cost of running expensive machines for five or six hours to produce sixty pounds of powder, it is plain that they didn't do that for fun.

Startup was the most dangerous moment in the mill, because that presented most risk of iron rubbing on iron. Most of the rolling could be done with the employees at a distance. I understand the Brazilian plant still use electric motors, but outside the buildings, and the floors are flooded, so that any material falling from the bed doesn't become dry underfoot. But it wasn't a totally remote operation. The bed of the derelict powder mill in this picture is probably better shaped than the early ones, but the lines are to let the operator see if the rollers are sliding instead of rotating. I think I see the overhead cistern, and the operating rod running from the other mills.

If you go to www.maps.google.com (http://www.maps.google.com) and enter the position 55.623056, -4.732144 in the search box, you can see a map or satellite imagery for what was once the largest explosives factory in the world, although in wartime it was exceeded by a factory complex extending over twelve miles, straddling the England-Scotland border. They didn't stretch them out like that, or build all those blast walls, for nothing.

[Fly]

I wonder why they did not use brass wheels in the day?
Fly

[Ballistics in Scotland]

They weighed several tons, and were too expensive. They started with stone on stone, then iron on a stone bed, and finally iron on iron.

[Texantothecore]

I wonder why they did not use brass wheels in the day?
Fly

Bronze and brass were probably quite expensive and would west out faster. Iron was most likely much cheaper.