Thread: Home Brew Black Powder........Craft Powder?

I'm feeling a bit rude just jumping in - but to make decent powder you need good charcoal and a ball mill. Mine is just a plastic bottle a third filled with .54 lead balls. My charcoal wood is willow I get from a horse paddock down the road and I prep it how Akaroa says - just peel the sticks and dry before cooking.
Last lot I did was red alder and I temperature controlled the 'cook' on that as do the 'Swiss Powder' makers - and it was erratic as hell, only good for the shottie.
I screwed that up - undercooked it.
I use.the 'Double and Double' method making it, then sieve the components together and compress it in a die.
With my usual 'randomly cooked' willow charcoal I can't tell the difference between 'homemade' and Goex - they shoot as accurate as each other and to the same point of aim, they just look a bit different, no gloss on the homemade - I don't polish it.
I run my charcoal/sulphur and charcoal/nitrate mixes for three hours in the lathe, they're non-explosive - it's only when you mix them together you got the 'bang' potential.
I use elemental sulphur - haven't used the 'flowers'.
Nitre and charcoal are an explosive mix, but not if you keep your charcoal content below a certain ratio - it's all under the 'Double and Double' method of making BP on the Net.

And come to 'explosive potential' - I used to beat the shit out of my 'compressed BP pucks' with a hammer on a concrete floor - I even set a puck on a piece of paper I set fire to, and watched as the flames licked around the 'puck' and went out. When your BP grains get to 51 grams each (6mm X 50mm) they're pretty hard to ignite.
I just break them with pliers these days and run them through a ceramic coffee grinder - and I make 1F, 2F, 3F, 4F for the flintlock prime and a shitload of dust I gotta remill and do all again.
Quite time consuming ........ and tedious ....... and, potentially dangerous.

I used to get cannon powder they used in the 'blanks' to salute the Queen's Birthday - had about fifty pound of it under my bed (along with a fucking big spider) and that mostly went shooting concrete filled beer cans out of a mortar and fishing.
Me and my mate even made exploding beer cans.
And that spider lived there the whole time - everyone was scared of it.

I did used to make it with a mortar and pestle - and I shot deer and goats with that stuff. It was incredibly filthy and left a lot of red globules in the barrel - but it did go bang.

And talking about cannon's - I remember some forty, maybe fifty years ago being on a farm that overlooked Lake Rotoma or Rotoehu out of Rotorua. A group of us had had a BP shoot and we were wrapping up when the guy with the 'beer can mortar' said -
"Hey guys, I got one shot left, what'll I shoot at ?"
And way down below us was a dot of a swan quite happily relaxing on the water.
"Have a whack at that swan."
And he did ......... and we watched that swan become a floating wreck amidst a widening pool of feathers - and we were shocked .........
"You rotten bastard, why'd you do that for ..... ?"
And we all buggered off in disgust.