OK, the moment of TRUTH has arrived!
To get straight to the point, I'd call it a qualified success. The powder works very well. But it is not as powerful as Goex, and it is much dirtier.
To give some background on my shooting experience: I have been shooting competitively in the North-South Skirmish Association for 9 years now. I shoot musket, carbine, smoothbore, and revolver. My usual powder is Goex; once my shop was out and I had to use Shuetzen. I found it dirty enough that the Moose Wilkinson bullet I shoot, which has very limited lube carrying capability, was unusable within 3-5 shots. I normally shoot 70 grains 3F Goex in my smoothbore. My buddy let me use some of his ammo at a skirmish last November when I forgot mine. I came off the line and immediately said, "That doesn't feel like 70 grains!" He then said, "It's not Goex, it's "Reenactor Powder". So I was pleased that I could sense the difference.
My home-made powder is made using poplar wood from Home Depot. I am using 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal, 10% sulfur. The sulfur is 99.5% pure and the kno3 is 99.8% pure from Duda Energy. I am misting my green meal with distilled water. I am pulverizing the ingredients separately to dust before milling in a Harbor Freight rock tumber ball mill for about 5 hours. Tumbling media is 1/2" copper pipe cut into 1" segments and filled with lead. The ends are domed to trap the lead. I am pressing pucks using a 12 ton Harbor Freight hydraulic press. Pucks are held under pressure for 5 minutes. I'm using a Fly puck die/piston that is 2" in diameter. Pucks are dried using a dehydrator and broken into chunks and ground through a ceramic coffee grinder. Results are screened for 2F and 3F. Fines are recycled back into the ball mill.
I weighed my charges using an RCBS Chargmaster 1500 scale.
I can smell a slight difference in the odor of my home-made powder.
The powder is noticeably dirtier to shoot. Loading became progressively harder, and this happened faster, with the home made powder. With Goex I can pretty much shoot indefinitely with no change in loading effort. In competition, in a 5-minute course of fire I can typically get off 12-14 shots. I feel like loading effort was significantly impacted that it would probably slow down my times and limit the number of shots I could get off. You can see with the picture of the cleaning patches that the patches are quite a bit dirtier when cleaning the home-made powder. Now I only fired 6 shots of the Goex, and 10 of the home made, but still, the patches were way dirtier with home-made.
For the first test, I fired 6 shots of my normal competition round, the Moose Wilkinson 577-420 bullet, which is a compression style of bullet. It weihs about 426 grains cast in 99.97% pure lead. It has a very small lube groove and so does not carry much lube. I fired 6 shots because the first one gave an error through the chronograph. This bullet was fired with 50 grains of 3F Goex. The average velocity of the 5 good shots was 1043.6 feet per second.
I then fired 10 shots using my home-made powder. I used 50 grains by weight. 2 shots errored out on the chrono. The average velocity of the 8 good shots was 918.9 feet per second. This is a velocity reduction of about 125 fps.
I then fired 10 shots using my Pedersoli P58, using the RCBS-500M bullet. It weighs 535 grains when cast with 99.97% pure lead. This is a traditional "minie ball" style of expanding ball bullet. I got 3 errors on the chrono when I failed to realize the sun had moved and my chrono was now in the shade. The average of the 7 good shots was 855 fps. I did not do any comparison to Goex for this round. The charge was 60 grains 3F home-made by weight.
One very positive thing to note is that as the target shows, the powder is quite effective! Accuracy was equivalent to the equal charge of Goex, for both bullets and guns. The left target is the P58/RCBS-500M, and the right target is the P53/Moose Wilkinson 577-420. The distance was 50 yards. Shots were made from a bench rest.
So, my take-away from this exercise is that it is relatively easy to make very effective black powder at home. Certainly if you are shooting patched round ball, or any other application where you are not rapidly loading multiple shots, home made powder is nearly as effective, if not the same as, commercial Goex powder. But for rapid-fire competition use, as I need to use it, I would not switch to my home-made over Goex.
I live in a subdivision. Aside from the 3 willow trees growing down by the neighborhood drainage ponds, which I don't think anyone would appreciate me carving on, I have no way to procure willow. I'm going to see if willow charcoal can be purchased and try a new batch.
Note on the paper target - all the holes to the right of the paper are from someone else. All my shots are on the paper. As you can see, almost all the shots are in the 4" black.
As Vette noted, black powder carries it's own oxygenation in the KNO3. This is why it burns (and vigorously) when sealed up inside a gun barrel or cartridge.I'm using that same dehydrator. I don't think you have much to worry about when pucking. There's no oxygen in there. I did mine with a stainless steel die just going slow. I'm tempted to try and light a puck on fire to see what it does but I don't want to waste that much right now.
I have not lit an entire puck, but I did light puck chunks, and they burn almost as rapidly as loose powder. The chunk does tend to fly off like a little rocket motor for the half a second it is still in existence. I also lit damp green meal and it also burns quite rapidly - much more than I expected with it having been dampened for pressing.
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Originally Posted by Eddie2002
