Sulfur "bed"?

[GoodOlBoy]

Once upon a time I read an article talking about homemade black powder and the article gave details on how to make a sulfur "bed". For the life of me I can't remember much other than it seemed to me it was a composting bed of some sort, but I can't even remember that much. All I remember was that it was touted as being the solution to acquiring sulfur for making homemade black powder. Seems to me it was also a very OLD article, probably 1940s or so, but I can't be sure. There's been alot rattle around in this old noggin and some of it fell out.

Anyway does this sound familiar to anybody?

God Bless, and One Love.

GoodOlBoy

[Geezer in NH]

Uh maybe it was for the nitrate????

[adrians]

I seem to recall a video of some younger survivalist fella and he was composting for about a year or two to get nitrate for his BP.
I could be way off base here, my memory gets worse every day... .

I would google something like " Making BP the natural way " or something like that...

You might find what your looking for.
Good luck and let us know if you dig anything up..

[Fly]

Ya is was for making potassium nitrate KNO -3 most likely.
Most during the Civil War came from bat caves.

Fly

[GoodOlBoy]

Yeah I know about the KNO3 beds. Heck even chicken poop contains enough to make it worthwhile using for a KNO3 bed. Although the best thing I saw for that was using a V trough with straw and gravel like you use for getting lye out of ashes for extracting the KNO3 then boiling the water.

But I would have sworn there was something about a sulfur bed. I remember the mention of rotten eggs, and other things in relationship to it... heck I dunno. Like I said the noggin has lost a bit over the years.

God Bless, and One Love.

GoodOlBoy

[Tatume]

One method of refining sulfur is to make a "bed" of sulfur-containing ore and ignite it. The sulfur will melt and drain to the bottom, where it is collected. I believe this method originated in Italy. For the method to be useful, the ore must contain a high concentration of elemental sulfur. Such ores can be found in Louisiana and Texas, as well as Sicily, Italy.