So I was gonna try and buy some black powder but at the cost of 115 euros per kilo or ~2lbs I decided against it. I googled around and could not find anything that said it'd be illegal to make here, someone said it was legal, so now I have bought 800 grams of airfloat grade willow charcoal and another 900 grams of sulphur. I got access to free 99% KNO3 via my parents farm so in terms of components this powder is gonna cost me about 4 euros a kilo vs 115.
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I've been looking through the various methods and simply cooking up the ingredients in water until you get the right consistency seems like the simplest method to me, then add alcohol (does it have to be isopropyl, what about denatured alcohol). What I see most people do after is corn it before it dries. But it seems to me that what the pros do is make compressed pucks. From what I've understood of the process, compressing it into pucks is what yields higher densities like the storebought stuff. Then you corn it. They smash the pucks with mallets then sift through multiple meshes. I am wondering if you could use an adjustable mill to grind these up into consistent granules?
I don't really understand why the ball mill method should be better than this procedure however? I thought it was because it mixes stuff better than dry mixing with mortar & pestle, but if I use prebought superfine charcoal etc and mix wet it seems to me I should get the same results more or less.