My homemade black powder

[Eddie2002]

Increasing the sulfur to 75 15 12 will lower the ignition temperature if you are using a rock lock. I just remembered that I have a small ceramic kiln that will regulate the temperature at 600 degrees. Humm

[HamGunner]

Great to see such a well stated explanation of the charcoal/ash relationship. Somewhere on the internet I found what I thought was some good information on the temperature needed for the charcoal production. It said to keep it below 750 degree F. Well, I did notice that lots of the creosote was charred onto the sides and lid of my can and was being blown out the vent hole as well. I wondered about that, but thought perhaps the creosote was not a desirable contribution to the charcoal. Live and learn. I have Black Willow, but actually only enough made up to do maybe another three or four pounds of BP, so now, thanks to Linstrum, I can at least make better use of the charcoal that I have by compensating for the ash content. Next time I make charcoal, I hope to have some that will kick butt. I have decent BP now, and today I did tumble the 5 lbs. that I had already made up to help with the consistency and screened off more flour dust and even had a bit of FFFFG to give to a friend for his flintlock . The FFFG ended up very uniform and hardly any dust in it now. I gained about another grain today by weight of the volume that I use for comparison to Goex. That volume of Goex weighs 24 gr. and now my BP is up to 22.5 gr. I am getting there. Now to increase the strength with better charcoal is my new goal. What a hobby. It is fun to learn new tricks.

[LAGS]

Increasing your sulfur to a 12% makes your mix actually 74/14/12 mix.
You can not just increase one chemical without disrupting the ratio.
All numbers need to total to 100%

[swamp]

If you add more charcoal to compensate for the ash content, aren't you also adding more ash?
swamp

[LAGS]

I would think that the Ash is an inert material and only taking up space , and would have little effect in small quantity except for adding soot to your burned powder.
Lindstrom.
When you were in California.
Did you ever try making charcoal out of Sumac.
I know that plant was very explosive either live or dead when we had brush fires.
And when burnt , it turned to ash quickly and didn't leave unburned branches on the ground.

[DoubleBuck]

If you add more charcoal to compensate for the ash content, aren't you also adding more ash?
swamp

Swamp, if your charcoal ash content is say 10%, and just say the formula says to add 10 grams of charcoal; then the 10 grams you add, only one gram, or 10% of it is also ash. To answer your question, you would be adding more 10% ash charcoal, but the total weight of the charcoal would be greater. In other words, in this case, you would be adding 10 total grams of charcoal, which would also contain one gram of ash. So, yes, technically, by adding more charcoal, you're adding more ash. haha So instead of 10 grams, you might want to add 11. haha I'm here to help any way I can!

[almar]

Great to see such a well stated explanation of the charcoal/ash relationship. Somewhere on the internet I found what I thought was some good information on the temperature needed for the charcoal production. It said to keep it below 750 degree F. Well, I did notice that lots of the creosote was charred onto the sides and lid of my can and was being blown out the vent hole as well. I wondered about that, but thought perhaps the creosote was not a desirable contribution to the charcoal. Live and learn. I have Black Willow, but actually only enough made up to do maybe another three or four pounds of BP, so now, thanks to Linstrum, I can at least make better use of the charcoal that I have by compensating for the ash content. Next time I make charcoal, I hope to have some that will kick butt. I have decent BP now, and today I did tumble the 5 lbs. that I had already made up to help with the consistency and screened off more flour dust and even had a bit of FFFFG to give to a friend for his flintlock . The FFFG ended up very uniform and hardly any dust in it now. I gained about another grain today by weight of the volume that I use for comparison to Goex. That volume of Goex weighs 24 gr. and now my BP is up to 22.5 gr. I am getting there. Now to increase the strength with better charcoal is my new goal. What a hobby. It is fun to learn new tricks.

I struggled with the density with my first few batches, the last test batch matched swiss 3f in density per volume and bested goex 2f slightly. I don't have the exact numbers on hand but 30 gr/volume of my 2f and 3f was between 30 and 31 gr/weight whereas goex 2f was slightly under 30gr. And this was with dry powder. There are 2 things that helped push the density increase, the first one was the powder left with the grains but you fixed that, the second was the milling time. No matter how much you press down on coarse powder, it will not compress as much as a finer powder. All it took was one more hour in my case for a total of 4 or 25% more time. Every ball mill is different so 1 hour might be different. Its was a struggle to fight against the clumping but reducing the humidity of the media and the powder before milling helped. 3500 psi pressure in the press for 1 hour did the trick, the pucks were MUCH denser at about 1.9 to 2 g/cc.

[almar]

a few things to note this morning.

1-When performing the linstrum ash test, moisture content could be a factor to consider, doing the test on a fresh charred batch should be fine but if left to rest for a period of time, the weight of the charcoal could be skewed by water content. Although this might be minimal, so is the resulting ash content.

2-When cooking charcoal, the application of heat to the cylinder is highest on the outside and lower on the inside, the charcoal on the outer edges (including the bottom) will cook more than the wood on the inside of the cylinder. In other words, not all the charcoal will be even, It would rotate the charcoal in the cylinder a few times during the cook but be careful with the charcoal igniting, it did not happen to me yesterday but it can. However when performing the test, it would be more accurate to measure the ash content of the entire milled batch of charcoal. The reading i'm getting this morning on this larger sample is much lower, I have a as content of 0.52gr/30gr = 1.7%.

3- For the same reasons as in point 2, the wood to be charred should be in small chunks and as evenly sized as possible for a more even cook.

These are just some thoughts offered for those who may find them useful.

[HamGunner]

My charcoal was charred at around 700-725 degrees F. the best I could tell, made from debarked dry dead limbs of Black Willow split up into uniform size to fit in my retort container. I charred it inside a 1lb. coffee can that I placed on top of about 2 lbs of lead in a 20 lb. Lee furnace. Anyway, I weighed out 30 gr. of my Black Willow Charcoal and placed it on a large flat canning lid and placed it on the stove to turn it to ash to calculate the ash content. The 30 gr. reduced to 2.9 gr. of ash which I believe calculates to 9.6 %. I will need 16.6 % charcoal in my BP formula to increase the available fuel to a bit closer to what I guess it needs to be.This batch is not wasted of course and I really do not have all that much left before I modify my next retort procedure to try and keep the temperature down below 600 degrees F. I think I will place my RCBS casting thermometer probe about 3/4 of the way down into the center of the coffee can and use that for my temperature control instead of trying to rely on the number settings of the Lee casting pot as they are really not as stable as it will need to be to maintain a good watch on the top temperatures inside the coffee can. I did quickly mix the partially charred wood about half way through the retort burn to help make it more uniform, but of course it apparently got over cooked anyway. Next batch will hopefully be much better. I will also try a longer mill time as well as compression time on the BP flour when compressing into the pucks. I am very happy with my BP as is for my use, mostly in a .36 Cal. 1851 Colt Navy replica and a .32 Cal. CVA short barreled squirrel carbine. But if I can increase the weight density along with a reduced ash content it certainly will increase my smile factor a bit.

Edit: And thanks Almar for your pointers. Every little bit helps.

[Vettepilot]

Wow! All this is very interesting and a new angle on our BP production for sure. As regards the temperature of cooking the charcoal, I had touched on that subject briefly a good while back.

One thing jumped out at me though, and that was the word "sugar" in relation to the chemical content of the wood being used. Sugar very definitely does have a high energy content.

So, this has me wondering what would happen if a person added a small amount of powdered sugar, (2%??), to our mix before milling?? Might be an interesting experiment...

Aren't sugars of some sort used in Black Powder substitutes? Seems like maybe Triple 7 does, but I could be wrong on that.

Anyway, KNO3 mixed with sugar makes a pretty good rocket fuel, so maybe some experimentation in this area would be justified/interesting...

Vettepilot

[Vettepilot]

@TROOPERDAN

I tried to send you a private message, but it said your mailbox is too full to accept any more.

Vettepilot

[Blood Trail]

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[trooperdan]

I cleaned it out a bit.

[LAGS]

If you want a wood with lots of natural sugar try Curly Maple.
I don't know how much sugar is in the softer Maple with the I unfigured grain.
I had used that before but only with Fireworks powder.
So I have no performance report when used in muzzleloaders

[almar]

I have a sacrificial batch of 75 10:15 milled powder in storage for which I have a Baseline velocity. Although I do not understand what the sugar would do in there stoichiometric point of view, I could adjust potassium and add sugar say 2%, we would end up with 75 10 13 and 2 and see what it does for velocity. I'm currently focused on producing good charcoal for now before I even make another batch, I'm getting very close i believe. My weekend project came to an abrupt end, due to an incident involving my finger and the splitting axe. All is good nothing permanent i hope but my pointer finger became about 1/4 inches shorter instantly.

[Vettepilot]

Ouch! I hope that heals well and quickly for you.

And yeah! That would be interesting if you could try the sugar experiment. I've got way too many irons in the fire to try it myself any time soon. Should be an interesting experiment!!

Take care, (with axes!)
Vettepilot

[LAGS]

I am going to talk to a friend that use to make Rocket Fuel with the sugar.
He gave me 6 bottles of stump remover when he stopped doing it.
But what I remember, the rocket fuel burned way slower than the BP did.
But that was burning in a more solid form like mixed hot and poured into the rocket body.

[almar]

I think I have that charcoal process down now. Or maybe I got lucky this time. I found that filling the big paint can with charcoal and dipping in the lead caused a lot of variance in the charcoal so I put a smaller quart sized paint can in the big paint can with the thermocouple in it. the heat rose quickly to 210 deg and stalled for 15 minutes then rose again quickly. Heat management is critical because the brakes are weak, even if turn the heat off the heat keeps rising and you don't want to pass 600 deg, after about 1 hour I have a very nice charcoal with a distinct brown color. Smearing it on white paper give a similar color than the swiss charcoal. This is black willow:



previous batches had a lot of uncharred wood remaining this batch came out great, no uncooked wood.

[SeaMonkey]

Great work and excellent report Almar!

Can you tell us whether there is anything different in the way it feels when crushed in the hand, or maybe even the way it smells?

Does it seem to be softer than Char made at the higher temperatures?

[Linstrum]

What I figured out in a hurry for splitting wood into clothespin size pieces for roasting was to first saw my wood into "biscuits", and then use my large size tree trimming lopping shears to split the biscuits into sticks. That way, I didn't have to use my little roof shingler's hatchet and risk my fingers. I also didn't have to go all over the place picking up what I split, and then clean the dirt off. I split my wood inside on my kitchen floor, with one handle of the lopping shear on the floor, and operating just one handle. It goes pretty fast, and I can control exactly where I want the wood to split at. I cut the thickness of the biscuits to match how far the lopping shear blades open up. I still pull my fingers back before "chomping" down on the wood.

I've been shooting, casting, reloading, chopping firewood, running power saws and chainsaws and a sawmill, running cattle, driving dozers, operating a milling machine and lathe, and making black powder, some of that stuff going back to 1958, and none of it has got me yet. Yet - - - sometimes I wonder why NOT yet.