One golden rule of the internet is never to believe anything on social media, unless it is backed up by some sort of reputable source. Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, but some people will stage anything, by any stratagem, to make it happen now. Still, this one is backed up, and two fingers seems a pretty reasonable tariff for what he did. It could take years for him to disappear altogether.
All firearms propellants depend to a great extent on grain size to control their burning rate. They burn in layers from the outside to the inside, like peeling the skins from an onion, and peeling, say, a 1/10in. thick skin from a large onion will inevitably produce more of whatever it turns into than 1/10in. from a small onion. T
The only case in which this doesn't apply is a high explosive. Blasting gelatin, for example, has a far higher ratio of nitroglycerin to nitrocellulose than any powder, and as a result, if ignited violently, it ignites as the shock wave travels through it, at a far higher speed than any propellant. It will cut steel even if unconfined. But even this will only burn if ignited with a match. I wonder if anybody, short of propellant pellets for an inline muzzle loader, has ever tried a bit of gelignite? My guess would be about a 25% chance of being a miserably weak propellant (due to the primer being a very poor substitute for a blasting detonator), and 75% chance of being a lot more than two fingers; worth of grenade.
Returning to propellant powders, you can see the difference in the speed large grains burn, compared with small ones, if you ignite a little in a saucer. That goes for black or smokeless alike, and both burn for far longer than the bore time of any firearm. Grain size for grain size, the black powder will burn away much faster. But that is only at atmospheric pressure. Confinement increases the burning rate, no matter what kind of powder you use.
The difference is that with black powder the burning rate is approximately proportional to pressure. Multiply that atmospheric pressure a hundred times, and the gas supply becomes about a hundred times faster. Put simply, anything that increases pressure will increase it a lot more with smokeless than black. In the case of our unfortunate amputee, these included quantity, extremely fast shotgun powder, and using smokeless at all. That is assuming he didn't, overcome with his own ingenuity, accidentally load two bullets.
In slow rifle powders the burning rate can indeed be adjusted by perforations and/or retardant coatings. The latter is particularly important with ball powders, in which the gas supply declines more than it does with sticks or flakes. But I think grain size is more important. Perforations incidentally (increasing the internal burn surface as the external burn surface reduces) were invented for the plum-sized moulded black powder grains used in the largest sizes of cannon. But nobody misses them in firearm black powder.
The idea of 30% of the BP load in 4198 isn't a bad one, if applied to a fairly late and non-notorious cartridge BP firearm in good condition. For the cartridge maintains a given space behind the bullet. Loading density is one of those factors which matter much, much more with smokeless than black, and the person who merrily rams a muzzle-loader bullet down on top of smokeless is joining a guaranteed 100% loading density (or more likely compression) to the wrong type, the high speed of shotgun powder, and possibly other things I haven't thought of yet.
In theory it is possible to make a muzzle loader cope with smokeless. I seem to remember one was made in Mexico a long time ago. It may have been in the days when a little more violent death in Mexico was unlikely to be noticed. Nonsense to complain really. But my guess is that besides greater strength than a BP muzzle loader, it had a shoulder in front of the chamber, to guarantee the powder space. But that wouldn't make it safe if the powder charge extended beyond that shoulder, or the wrong type of smokeless was used.
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Originally Posted by Screwbolts
