My homemade black powder

[Fly]

I never knew about those things. Great idea! If a guy had a 5gal bucket with a lid & put
his powder or kno-3 & that stuff in with it & seal it. That would solve a lot of problems.

Also put it in a gun cabinet. I must order some, Thanks for the tip, Fly

[Hotfxr]

I never knew about those things. Great idea! If a guy had a 5gal bucket with a lid & put
his powder or kno-3 & that stuff in with it & seal it. That would solve a lot of problems.

Also put it in a gun cabinet. I must order some, Thanks for the tip, Fly

It's the same stuff that comes in beef jerky, shoes, aspirin, those little envelopes that say "do not eat". We used it to keep tents, boats, and RV's from molding. The stuff works great.

[Whiterabbit]

APP powder comes with those packs in there. they work.

[Multigunner]

The French were known for making the most moisture resistant black powder. Their secret was that they used wine to mix the ingredients into a mush like consistency then ran this through a sieve to granulate it and as the granules dried the natural polymers in the wine deposited a micro-thin moisture resistant coating.

Professional cannoneers pulled a fast one by requisitioning high quality wine for the purpose, getting drunk as skunks while preparing the mix, then urinating into the pots. The urine carried the polymers from the wine and worked just as well, though it was probably a bit smelly.

[Whiterabbit]

And if that were true, you'd be able to FOIA the US military studies of polymer extraction and isolation and synthetic production of equivalent material to add to the mix to achieve the same performance for our own guys.

[Fly]

My so that's where the urine myth came from. DONT piss in your powder, don't care what anyone said.
Oh go ahead if you think it works (wink)

Fly

[Texantothecore]

I do suspect that mixing urine into your bp will clear out the downwind shooters at the range but I think I'll pass on that. Urine doesn't contain enough kno3 to make any difference. Chicken poop, on the other hand is packed full of kno3. Jes sayin.

One of the designs I thought through for drying was a wind tunnel using my cheapo shop fan but I rejected it due to size issues.

I am a bit intrigued by a vacuum pump method and looked at the system used for packing clothes in a vacuum but I was not sure that the vacuum would draw enough vacuum to be effective.

So the dehydrator was the way to go. I am trying to figure out now how to tell when the puck is dry to minimize time in the drying process. I suspect that experience and testing will tell the tale.

[Boz330]

I guess that if you are making a lot of BP the dehydrator makes sense. Personally I would be a little leery about several pounds of BP pucks sitting 2 to 6 inches over an electric heating element.
I have dried my pucks anywhere from 1 day in the summer sun to several weeks sitting on a screen in my workshop during the fall. The difference in velocity, POI, or recoil was well within normal operating parameters for what I do with it. To me you guys might be over thinking this stuff. Don't get me wrong, if that is what you want to do, more power to you but I'm not sure that the added expense and labor is producing measurable results. BP is only going to drive a boolit so fast and that is all you are going to get regardless of what you do.
OTOH batch to batch consistency is worth shooting for but I believe that, that is in the processing of the CC more than anything else and would require equipment out of the reach of most hobbyist producers.

Bob

[Fly]

Bob have you filled your tags yet. If so I love pics!

Fly

[Fly]

Bob I got to thinking about what you said. I respect that, & I,m very safety minded as you. But I had
a Pyro friend that helped me into fireworks making & was the best of the best in making rockets. I,m
not going to name him for reasons of my own.

But he used a ole crock pot to dry his whistle mix with the lid off. Whistle mix is most likely the most
dangerous mix in pyro . Just a thought.

Fly

[Boz330]

Fly, as I said "I" would be leery. I believe that everyone is responsible for their actions and they have the ability to determine what they think is safe. I didn't proclaim that they are unsafe or stupid for what they are doing, just stated my opinion.

Last year on November 7th I celebrated my 50th year as a skydiver. I remember folks telling my parents that I had a death wish and was stupid for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. It has been 51 years and I'm still here, which all of those folks are not. I also wear a seat belt every time I climb into a car or airplane but I wouldn't force that on anyone else. But then I've been in 2 head on collisions and multiple deadstick landings in airplanes. To each his own, I only have to pay the piper for my mistakes.

Bob

[Fly]

Dude you are the coolest! I made one static line jump when I was young. You dee man No more for me of jumping.
At least if I blow my self up I won't see it coming. (WINK) Heeeeeeeeeeeee Heeeeeeeeeeee!

That care buddy Fly

[Texantothecore]

I guess that if you are making a lot of BP the dehydrator makes sense. Personally I would be a little leery about several pounds of BP pucks sitting 2 to 6 inches over an electric heating element.
I have dried my pucks anywhere from 1 day in the summer sun to several weeks sitting on a screen in my workshop during the fall. The difference in velocity, POI, or recoil was well within normal operating parameters for what I do with it. To me you guys might be over thinking this stuff. Don't get me wrong, if that is what you want to do, more power to you but I'm not sure that the added expense and labor is producing measurable results. BP is only going to drive a boolit so fast and that is all you are going to get regardless of what you do.
OTOH batch to batch consistency is worth shooting for but I believe that, that is in the processing of the CC more than anything else and would require equipment out of the reach of most hobbyist producers.

Bob

The reason that I'm looking for more than the usual speed is that I don't have a lot of time between work and church. I have started to pour bullets between 6:30 and 7:30 am in the morning and I am at the office before eight. Just very busy.

[Texantothecore]

The other reason is that the first puck is going to be checked with a chronograph and pressure adjustments on the rest of that batch to yield consistent results. I have no idea whether that will be of any help but we're going to try it.

So drying fast is a must.

[Skipper]

Fly, as I said "I" would be leery. I believe that everyone is responsible for their actions and they have the ability to determine what they think is safe. I didn't proclaim that they are unsafe or stupid for what they are doing, just stated my opinion.

Last year on November 7th I celebrated my 50th year as a skydiver. I remember folks telling my parents that I had a death wish and was stupid for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. It has been 51 years and I'm still here, which all of those folks are not. I also wear a seat belt every time I climb into a car or airplane but I wouldn't force that on anyone else. But then I've been in 2 head on collisions and multiple deadstick landings in airplanes. To each his own, I only have to pay the piper for my mistakes.

Bob

There is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.

[Boz330]

There is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.

Tell me about it, I have several dead sticks under my belt. All except one on an airport. The off airport landing tightened the old sphincter pretty good since there was a power line across the only field available. Nary a scratch on me or the airplane, until I walked out of the field of briars I landed in.

Bob

[LynC2]

Like the old saying: "Any landing you can walk away from is a good one."

[downunderrunner]

3 stats, 2 HALO, 4 HAHO, all before 30, think i'm done pushing my luck THAT far! lol, i'll stick to powder making............

[Boz330]

3 stats, 2 HALO, 4 HAHO, all before 30, think i'm done pushing my luck THAT far! lol, i'll stick to powder making............

My 1st jump was also my 1st airplane ride. I was ate up with it after the first jump. The other 2 guys I went with never made another jump. By the time I was Drafted into the Army I had 125 jumps. Requested airborne training but never got it.
Closest thing to military jumps was test jumping some static line, HALO/HAHO equipment that I helped design while working for Parachute Industries of South Africa. The static line system cost me a broken rib when I made a high speed reserve deployment after a total malfunction. So the powder making is probably safer.

Bob

[Hotfxr]

I owned a Citabria 7KCAB and built a Hatz CB1 (Basically a 7/8 scale Waco 7) and with a tail dragger they are all dead stick landings. Plus I really liked to fly upside down. Throw in a couple of engine out landings on back roads & fields and one nerve wracking auto rotation landing on a sandbar in the middle of a river, and powder making seems just a bit tame. Can't afford to fly anymore so I will stick with the BP until I win the lottery. I got one of those dehydrators and put a couple of pucks through it. With a puck weighing in at just under 8oz, after 6 hours in the machine they lost almost 1 1/2 grams in weight and tinged like ceramic. The heat element is shielded from the chamber and I have it set on 125 degrees, about 1/3 of the dial. In all this, when I screen out the chunks after grinding, I am still getting about one third of the mix 4f and smaller. I am using a 20 ton press from Harbor Freight so I am hoping that I am getting at least 10 tons of pressure. It seems to squeeze out more liquid than I am putting in and I cannot figure out why I am getting so much fluffy powder at the end. Any advice?

Now that I have almost two pounds of cannon powder sitting on a shelf and a pound already formed into foil packets I don't have to worry about running short for a while. So I am going to try and make up a couple of batches milling for at least 72 hours and then letting the pucks dry out for a week or so, after a few hours in the dehumidifier. Then we will see how the powder crumbles.