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

Thanks for getting back to me on that, they seem to of gone under, trying to access their website results in an account suspended message,
I've seen them mentioned before, seems to be pretty hard to get KNO3 and decent elemental sulphur now,
seems to be the only sources I can find are Yara krista K plus KNO3 fertiliser ($95 at PGGwrightsons for 25kg) and Manutec garden sulphur which is $25 odd for 500 grams from KiwiGardener, Manutec make larger packs but cant find any in NZ plenty in aussie though so may be able to import them.

flower of sulphur is 99.9% and buy off trademe...saw it listed yesterday.....salt petre is still being sold garden supply places,hydroponic suppliers even better still

if you go back far enough.....folks would have got sulphur from scraping it from volcanic vents..salt petre is poohs n wees crystalized

Sulphur is used for gardening. We get it here from bunnings. Try gardening supplies.

Have not delt with them. But importing to NZ could be a problem.

https://www.petandgarden.com.au/liqu..._bag_size-1_kg

we have bunnings here......

I've read flowers of sulphur isn't what you want and can cause the powder to self ignite, dunno how true that is but elemental sulphur is available although only 1 source I could find that was 100% not 90% or lower, the only 100% stuff I could find is manutec brand from kiwi gardener, only sold in 500g bottles annoyingly but manutec makes 3kg bags and can be found through multiple AU retailers for between $15 and $30 maybe could be possible to convince a company to import them?,
potassium nitrate can be brought in the form of krista K plus from farm stores like PGGWrigthsons for $95 for a 25kg bag,

if you were going through the effort of import (and potential legal implications ?) I think you'd want to get some chemical grade which isn't exactly necessary for BP to work so may as well buy from within NZ, im finding that its quite important to get the powder as fine as possible (duh) although im limited by my current grinding methods, I can still see yellow specs of sulphur throughout my powder and it leaves a nasty residue which im guessing is due to incomplete burn possibly due to not being mixed thoroughly enough but todays batch was ground as many times as I could be bothered and it ignites much easier, still not to the point where the powder flashes but much faster burn time of around a second, 95% + humidty at the moment so ill wait till we get some sun and see if drying it out helps it flash

Not true flowers if sulphur is pure sulphur in dust form, it's ideal as the crystal or prill stuff is a bugger to grind even in a lead ball mill. Also carbon black pigment for ink making is ready to go if you can get a source leaving you with just the saltpetre to grind to a dust.

I revisited my supplies this morning and put my remaining groundup charcoal through a seive....ummmm eye opening just how much bigger lumps were still in there...reground those bits till it all went through seive.... makes much more sense to me anyway..to do it that way around now I stop and think about it.
if your worried about self ignition...forget all about black powder.... as I said to you earlier...follow the instructions to WET MIX it in THE CORRECT order and the risk is much much less...... now pucking,compressing and ball milling are a completely different matter again..all bets are off if you chose to attemp doing stuff to a highly flammable substance once it is in its complete mixture
SF90 would tell you ,it can bite and put you in hospital for quite some time if you get it wrong

I also spread out my last batch of BP and gave it a couple of hours of sunlight..appears to have sucked in some moisture if indeed I had dried it completely to begin with.

Thank you for your insight, I had read (potentially incorrectly) that flowers of sulphur was *refined via sublimation* and elemental was either from the ground or a byproduct of oil refining but can be sold as floured sulphur, potentially that means dusting sulphur for ponies would work cause (flowers of sulphur) it’s a fair bit cheaper, maybe I’ll try a small bag some time. * think I’ll investigate further as some sources say it’s bad and others say it’s good for, have to love the duality of the internet*
If you aren’t compressing it into pucks how do you go about granulating/Corning the BP to 1f, 2f, 3f etc?
I’ll mill the bp in two seperate batches using the double and double method recommended to me by SF90, that way you don’t have an explosive mixture until you combine the two batches after milling,
Still not sure if I’ll use a binder or hydraulic press yet, the binder is cheaper to try out I guess and adds to the journey even if I end up going with the press later, don’t need the power of commercial just looking for a comfortable to shoot 1oz load for my 12gauge for now, should have plenty of space in there to not be overly concerned with density


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i dont grade it....I just use it as it is...

I pulled a dozen loads today...primers had gone funky...still havent worked that one out...its like verdegrease around primer and one was visably damp...Im picking the salt petre is sucking atmospheric moisture...and I will/must clean cases much better before reloading them to remove any residue....half the rounds the powder poured out without much effort ,the other half needed poking out and breaking up to remove from case..it all burnt easily..very easily in fact....as a side note 150grains of black powder thrown into fire will fill house with smoke and test alarms .....50 grms will fizzle away no problem....150,yeah not good idea LOL.

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.

Welcome back mate....I have dearly missed your humour.

Oh - I'm still here ...... been rattling on about BRNO's.

Another thing about charcoal, is if you cook it in an oxygen deprived environment and grind it small and add it to soil - it'll enhance the growth of pine tree seedlings roughly two to threefold.