Homemade black powder

[delmar]

Anyone here ever make your own black powder? How did that work out for you? Did you make it with a ball mill, or make "fudge" out of it and grate it through a screen?

[gnoahhh]

Let's see, I've got all ten fingers and two eyes, two ears, all my teeth, so... nope never tried making my own blackpowder. The stuff is too cheap to mess around taking the un-Godly chance of something horrible happening.

[Lead Fred]

For thsoe that can get it, it was outlawed here and we have to smuggle it in from another state.

We made a wee bit years ago. If you keep the ground wet around it, and it doesnt dry to fast, your ok, if not BOOM.

[shotman]

Mortar and pestil is what I used. You only need to grind the Potassium Nitrate. sulfur and charcole is already fine enough . Just mix . I didnt use in a gun so the Fine powder was fine for me

[Southern Son]

Ages ago I used to go shooting on a farm down near Goulburn (more than twenty years ago, now that I think of it). The farm was a hobby for one of the petrochemists that worked at the oil refinery near where I lived. The fellow who owned it was a great bloke and I got on well with him and one of his sons. This bloke thought that teaching his son how to make black powder would be O.K.

Don't know where they got a couple of the elements, but they would mix it up wet, let it dry in a big clump over a few weeks, then just crumble it up with their hands. It was nothing too scientific, they were just making firecrackers.

One day, the son mixed up a batch and in a hurry to make it dry, he left it sitting on top of the wood burning stove in the shed where we all slept (there was no house on the property). The rest of use did not know about this. We were all sitting outside the shed watching a sunset when there was a massive wooshing sound inside the shed, then sulfur smelling smoke started pouring out of all the gaps in the shed, the the old man started yelling, it was all quite spectacular. I laughed so hard I fell off my chair.

I stopped laughing when I went to climb into my sleeping bag later that night and the bag smelt like rotton eggs. I ended up throwing the sleeping bag away several months later. The stink just never went away. Black powder is quite expensive here in Australia ($60.00 per kilo and up), but I think that I would rather pay for it than have to use that rough as guts, no two grains of powder the same size, spontaniously combusting, never burn the same way twice junk that they used to make on the farm.

[shotman]

Well I was looking at a price sheet for the componets and looks like it would be much cheaper to make than to buy. As for firecrackers or cherry bombs you need the flash powder. Its made with potassium perclorate and aluminum powder. I would say about 5gr of that is all it would take for a 45/70

[Mtman314]

Foxfire book 5 has all the instructions look it up on the web or your nearest book store.

[Jim]

You can also find instructions on how to burn down refineries, make thermonuclear warheads and blow your brains out with a large bore handgun.
I'm sorry, that was not pointed at anyone in particular. I'm just being a smart @$$. Seriously, many people have been killed or permantly crippled/wounded by messing around with homemade black powder. I would strongly advise against it.
To be very honest with you, I'm so flinchy about real BP, I won't keep it in my shop. I use the synthetic stuff.

[Mtman314]

The fox fire 5 book also covers gun making and a large number of other things such as chipping flints, cutting rifling with a homemade machine, etc. The Fox Fire series is about skills that enabled the mountain folks in Appilachia to survive. In the mountains the flintlocks were still being used into the 1960's.

[303Guy]

I've made the stuff and it worked OK in my shotgun and 44mag but it wouldn't cycle my 9mm. It didn't produce any spectacular velocity in the 44mag but it did work. It worked well in the shotgun. Cleaning was a bitch. I mixed mine wet with homemade charcoal. I wouldn't recommend making large quantities!

[RMulhern]

Hmmm....does Foxfire 5 talk about IDIOTS with no commonsense??

Just wondering!!

[trevj]

Take a run over to the Homegunsmith forum. Register, log in, and find the Blackpowder sub-forum. Set the preferences to "from the beginning" and find the 20 plus page thread on home-made powder there.

http://www.homegunsmith.com/cgi-bin/...;f=101;t=20596

The worrywarts and arm waving panic-meisters can go be worried elsewhere. Please.

With a reasonable level of (un)common sense, and a little self education, a pretty reasonable product can be made.

It may be worth remembering, that making bullets out of molten hot metal, is scary and dangerous to those that have no real concept of what a caster actually does. And you CAN actually hurt yourself really badly in this hobby, if you do something irrevocably stupid, whether it's dropping wet stuff into a melting pot, or similar such things.

As an educational experience, I think home made powder would be OK, with reasonable precautions taken. Being aware of the risks, and taking some level of personal responsibility for the results, is part of life, no?

Cheers
Trev

[jlchucker]

Let's see, I've got all ten fingers and two eyes, two ears, all my teeth, so... nope never tried making my own blackpowder. The stuff is too cheap to mess around taking the un-Godly chance of something horrible happening.

I agree. The same could be said about trying to make your own primers. Anyone that's ever worked at an ammo plant knows that this is a complex and dangerous business, since the mix that goes into primers is extremely volatile. I worked at one of these plants once, and there was a legend there--don't know if it's true or not, but no reason to doubt it. The person telling it was old enough to know first-hand. It occurred during WWII. Someone was walking between buildings with a bucket of primer mix, slipped and fell. They never found even the pieces of him.

If the day ever comes when we have to bootleg loading components, I can foresee a secretive industry growing around that need--but to pull it off they'll need a lot of knowhow and a lot of equipment to do it safely. For now though, I'll conserve my stash and buy commercial. It's a whole lot safer.

[cajun shooter]

Jim, That job of yours has gotten to your brain. When shooters go around spreading false hoods about something in our sport it hurts us all. Black powder is not dangerous to keep or use. It's like everything else in our world. It has a set of rules that come with it. Rule #1 is DON"T TRY TO MAKE YOUR OWN POWDER!! THE rest of the rules are common sense. You can hurt yourself with the burns from smokeless powder also. There is so much bull that is spread about BP that it would take a lifetime to straighten out. It is listed as a high explosive in some places and that is wrong. Not letting people have it to enjoy shooting is wrong. All it takes is some one who says that they know about BP and for that person to say that stuff is so dangerous I won't keep it in my house. Next thing you know we have a rumor. I was told just this morning at a CAS match by a life long shooter; I would never shoot that stuff in my guns and ruin them like you do. I asked him if he thought I bought new guns every week and how in the world are there so many old COLTS and Winchesters around. Back to the RULE#1 DON't make your own powder

[delmar]

Jim, That job of yours has gotten to your brain. When shooters go around spreading false hoods about something in our sport it hurts us all. Black powder is not dangerous to keep or use. It's like everything else in our world. It has a set of rules that come with it. Rule #1 is DON"T TRY TO MAKE YOUR OWN POWDER!! THE rest of the rules are common sense. You can hurt yourself with the burns from smokeless powder also. There is so much bull that is spread about BP that it would take a lifetime to straighten out. It is listed as a high explosive in some places and that is wrong. Not letting people have it to enjoy shooting is wrong. All it takes is some one who says that they know about BP and for that person to say that stuff is so dangerous I won't keep it in my house. Next thing you know we have a rumor. I was told just this morning at a CAS match by a life long shooter; I would never shoot that stuff in my guns and ruin them like you do. I asked him if he thought I bought new guns every week and how in the world are there so many old COLTS and Winchesters around. Back to the RULE#1 DON't make your own powder

Warnings about safety are a good thing, but it is not as if nobody in the history of the world has ever made their own powder safely.

[EOD3]

Making black powder can be done with relative safety IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING and you're not a candidate for a Darwin Award. There are a good many things that are potentially dangerous to make, ranging from deep fried foods to Nitroglycerin.

IMHO, the "safety" hysteria we sometimes see is severely detrimental to our sport(s). The uninitiated hear the self-described "ex spurts" (two guns) playing the safety one-upmanship game and they come away with the notion that there is an evil demon just waiting to kill the unwary spectator and the shooter is surely DOOMED. The safety NAZI's who live for the day they catch someone on TV or in a magazine not living up to the "commandments" are some of our worst enemies.

This rant is NOT a cheap shot at anyone here. I'm sure most of us know at least a couple of the folks I'm talking about.

PS: This message via REMOTE CAMERA

[muffinman]

Um wasn't the Op asking if anyone had actually made bp? I have not. Wow that was easy.

[zxcvbob]

I made some BP last year, using stump remover (bought it on clearance for $1 per pound), garden dusting sulfur, and home-made white cedar charcoal. Milled it in a Harbor Freight rock tumbler with a big handful of .457 hard lead balls, dampened the resulting dust with water and rubbing alcohol to make a stiff clay, then pressed it thru a wire screen (kitchen strainer) to make pulverone. It worked OK in .45 Colt cartridges once it was dry enough, but I need to find a purer source of cheap KNO3 before I try it again. (hydroponics or "spray grade" potassium nitrate fertilizer should be good enough)

[delmar]

Um wasn't the Op asking if anyone had actually made bp? I have not. Wow that was easy.

Thanks for your response, I guess I can put you on the list of people not to ask about how it is done safely.

[mold maker]

Do you think our ancestors went to WalMart and bought their powder in a plastic bottle????
It's been a couple centuries since the first black powder was made. Were they really that much smarter then?
No I haven't done it,,, yet,,, but I intend to try. I've been studying, what to use, and how, for over a year. There's no black magic involved.
I've made mistakes and had failures, but they were very well thought out and calculated. There was always a safety margin involved, and Yes I too still have all my fingers and eyes.