Originally Posted by
Trapper-Jack
It was a nice spring day here today and I took advantage of it to test some of my powder against Goex by volume. Most all of my shooting is "loading out of the bag" so a scale isn't an option. I set my brass adjustable powder measure to 65 grains and left it unchanged for the duration. All shots were out of a flintlock Great Plains 50 caliber. All the powder was made with the 75/15/10 blend. A five shot string of 65 grains of measured Goex yielded an average of 1357 fps. My willow charcoal powder averaged 1352.4 fps and the Quaking Aspen averaged 1355.6 and the Juniper averaged 1323.6. The Juniper is what surprised me as it is the closest to Goex in weight, almost identical where my willow and quakie is about 92 - 93% the weight of Goex per the same volume. The standard deviations for these strings ran Goex - 8, Willow - 10, Quakie - 22 and Juniper - 19. I'm beginning to think that while the density is important in corned powder, it isn't the whole story. I'm thinking that the different charcoal has a different horsepower content that should be taken into account.