Garden sulfur for BP

[GregLaROCHE]

Garden sulfur - used to make soils more acid. Alkaline soils tie up iron, other nutrients, also part of photosynthesis, necessary for chlorophyll, synthesizing sugars, starches, metabolizing nitrogen.

Where I am we add lime to make sure the soil less acid. I add ashes from the wood stove too. I once cleared an abandoned pasture that was overgrown and where I burned everything, in the spring there was a bright green circle of better grass where the fire was.

[indian joe]

Funny thing is that I also put left over charcoal and ash in my garden to help the soil.
I will have to check and see if any of the other chemicals I put in the garden contain KN03.

most garden blends will have potassium (in chloride or sulphate form) and nitrogen (as urea or nitrate or both) up front but maybe not in that (KNO3) form.

[indian joe]

Garden sulfur - used to make soils more acid. Alkaline soils tie up iron, other nutrients, also part of photosynthesis, necessary for chlorophyll, synthesizing sugars, starches, metabolizing nitrogen.

yep! used to be another version called yellow dusting sulphur - finer grind - to sprinkle on the chooks (thats a full sized "chicken" for americans) to keep bugs off them

[lead chucker]

I got my garden dusting sulfur to day and took a jar and put like a 1/4 pound of it in it and added some boiling water to it and stirred it up and was surprised how much muddy looking water was coming out of it. I think i will do this a couple times. Its got to be better than not doing it at all. This sulfur all in is about 6 dollars a pound. So here in Alaska thats not bad. I have used Specricide stum remover and pine charcoal and Some good sulfur when i was first learning how to make BP. It worked and i was impressed but dirty and doesn't have the punch my powder i make has now. So I hope this sulfur is going to be good enough.

[lead chucker]

I make my charcoal with cedar and use good quality KN03 and good quality sulfur. let it mill for at least 8-12 hours and then corn it. It is fast and clean as far as BP goes. About three weeks ago me and the wife went out to our cabin for the weekend and shot it probably 50-60 times and i never swabbed the barrel, even got to test out a bunch of my new home made caps. It was a good time. I uses pillow ticking and a mix of beeswax lanoline caster oil and olive oil. I must have got the mix right because it just works as patch lube. I made a lot of it which is good because i just eye balled it when i made it.

[LAGS]

I agree that as you use better chemicals , your powder improves.
But using the basics like garden sulfur and stump remover will work and can be improved with a little purification.
But realize.
That also , as you make more powder , your processing improves as you fine tune your methods , tools and time.
I agree with what you said about the stuff that is mixed in with the garden sulfur.
I didn't use boiling water.
But when the sulfur was put in water , the water went cloudy very quickly.
To me it looked like the same color of Cat Litter that I use for mixing with sand to do metal casting.
That tells me that the clay in the sulfur powder is probably Bentonite Clay.
That stuff is water soluble , but not flammable.
So that is a good reason to get most of it out of the sulfur.

[Brimstone]

My first experiments with black powder happened over 20 years ago.
Stump remover.
Soft hand picked chunks of water oak charcoal from the weekly bonfire.
Garden Sulfur in the bag.
Wood mortar and pestle from Walmart.

I still have and use that wood mortar and pestle to this day for mixing little test lots.

Anyhow. I had made a pound of powder way back then and quit black powder shooting. I left about 150-200gr worth in my flask, in a Tupperware shed that got blown over or partially collapsed by 4 hurricanes over that 20 years.
I finally got rid of the shed a few years back and in the process of clearing out, found this flask with powder in it. I was surprised it wasn't goop.

I tested it. Worked just as well as when I made it. Dirty thanks to poor char, poor sulfur and poor grinding but it went bang.

So the hardware store stuff wouldn't be my first choice but it's better than filtering, ion exchanging and boiling chicken poop nitrate and distilling raw sulfur.

[Richard66]

When I used so called garden sulfur I had a slower burning powder and it was dirty but I used it straight from the bag .S I buy the good stuff now.

[Andy45]

"I also put left over charcoal and ash in my garden to help the soil."

Not sure if this info applies to the above statement because I don't know what type of garden is being referred to.

PSA, I have a good friend who is an expert on hazardous waste. FYI, he cautions folks not to put ash from high-efficiency wood stoves on their veggie gardens because one of the byproducts is dioxin. Ash from a fireplace is fine though. I'm not risking exposing my family to that.

[deces]

[lead chucker]

A week ago i pressed my test powder into pucks and let it dry. I ran them through my grain grinder and screened out my 3 and 2 f powders and did a test and was quite impressed. It seemed to be as fast as when i used the higher grade Sulphur. So as far as Sulphur goes it might not need to be the best of the best, just needs to be there in a decent quality. I mixed the Sulphur with water and let it sit and poured of the dirty water like three times you lose a little but trying to get the muddy water out. Its not that much work. i would let it dry out a bit and then pit it in my toaster oven that is for shop stuff not the wife's and let it dry and bag it up for future use. Probably won't need to buy more for a couple years. It comes out nice and yellow and crushes into fine powder with ease.

[Brimstone]

Nice work.

[lead chucker]

Took that powder i made with the garden sulfur out and shot a bunch of it and seemed to work just fine. I used a flint lock rifle and didn't have any problems. Accuracy was good the recoil of the gun didnt seem to change. So ya thumbs up for garden sulfur.

[lead chucker]

Went to the range after work and ran into a friend that was shooting and had his chronograph out. He let me use it and with 75 gr 3F home grown powder it was in the high 1200 to1300 fps range both with 50 and 54 cal round balls. I was a little disapointed i thought it would be a higher velocity. what are you guys getting with home made powder. I wasnt using my better powder on this outing. I was shooting the powder i made with garden sulfur. I also noticed it seemed a little dirtier with the fowling. not sure what part sulfur has in the equation.

[Trapper-Jack]

I'm using garden sulfur in my powder at 10%. It is advertised as 90% pure. When I shot mine over my chronograph, with a weighed charge of 65 grains of Goex 2f measured 65 grains. 65 grains of my Willow powder measured 71 grains, so it is running a little lighter per volume of what Goex is, approximately 92%. Setting my measure at the 70 mark, I'm getting in the low 1400's. Compared to equal weight of Goex, the Goex went in the high 1300's. This was out of a .50 Great Plains flintlock.
I feel that there are a lot of other things that can also affect the velocity, such as the type of wood being used for your charcoal, how long and how hot was it cooked, how long were your powder ingredients milled, is it pucked or screened.
I'm milling my powder about 24 hours in my Harbor Freight mill. I'm pucking it in a 2" brass nipple with a 20 ton jack with 4.5% water and dry the pucks in a food dehydrator.

If you read post 7200 on page 360 of My homemade black powder, I gave a more complete summery.