Make your own black powder?

[Maillemaker]

Has anyone experimented with making their own black powder? With prices now about $20-$26 per pound delivered, manufacturing it at home for $5 a pound has an appeal.

I've been reading/watching several instructions on the web and it looks pretty simple to do. I suppose one would need to do some testing with a chronograph to really make a comparison.

Home-made powder is not graphite coated and so might be more susceptible to electrostatic discharge, I don't know.

Has anyone tried this?

Steve

[Muley Gil]

I believe those that have tried it are no longer among the living. :D

[jonk]

I've made it, purely as an experiment, in a VERY small quantity- namely, about a teaspoon's worth. Not enough to really cause injury. It went poof.

I know guys who make it in shooting quantity over on the cast boolit forum. Safety concerns of making pounds of explosives aside, which I wouldn't want to do in anything less than a post-apocalypse scenario, there are two questions you have to ask yourself.

1. What wood would you use, how would you get an even char reliably, and would you have enough of it to make in quantity. Most use alder, ash, or beech, which aren't cheap unless you go cut down a tree.
2. How you gonna sift it for granule size?

I sure wouldn't bother. It CAN be done of course, but there are very good and valid reasons why few companies make it, why it isn't widely available in stores, and why the N-SSA has rules about "no more than one pound of loose powder"... namely, it is dangerous stuff, best left to professionals.

[Maillemaker]

Well, there are companies that sell the ingredients in kit form, like Skylighter:

http://www.skylighter.com/Black-Powder-Kits.asp

Their "10 pound" kit costs $75 with shipping, or roughly $7.50 per pound. That's better than half-price for commercial powder.

But it also appears pretty easy to make your own charcoal. Soft woods seem to be recommended over hard wood. Pine, poplar, spruce, and others have been recommended. This could be bought at your local home improvement store. You can make a retort easily out of a paint can or a dutch oven. You basically roast it on a stove burner or in a fire until the smoke from the vent hole no longer supports a flame. About 1-2 hours.

You can also easily obtain both sulfur and potassium nitrate from your local home improvement store like Home Depot.

Sifting for granule size is easily done with wire mesh screen, readily available in a variety of sizes from places like McMaster-Carr.

So it does not look difficult to make. A friend of mine makes it for use in his home-made medieval "handgonnes" and it definitely goes "boom" like real BP. The real question, for our purposes, is can it be made consistently enough to work well in competition.

As long as you run your ball mill in a remote location, like out in the back yard sunk into a depression in the ground, this does not strike me as a particularly dangerous undertaking. The materials are inert until mixed, and during corning it is worked wet where again it is relatively inert. It's only during milling that it is being actively worked in a dry state. And of course the finished product is actual black powder but that is no more dangerous than the BP we currently have on hand.

I just dropped about $200 on 10 pounds of powder. It sure would make for nicer conversations with the wife it it was only $75. :)

Steve

[Kurt Lacko 7862]

The firearm exemption for the use, possession, storage and transportation of up to 50 pounds of black powder is for commercially manufactured black powder. I believe if you make it yourself your subject to magazine storage and the FEL distance chart along with a license for transportation/storage. I've been trying to find the FEL newsletter but they changed their website and its alittle difficult to navigate. If I locate it I'll post it. Kurt

www.atf.gov/file/21986/download (http://www.atf.gov/file/21986/download) look under Black Powder Open Letter, it mentions Commercially Manufactured BP. I'll look for other letters if there is interest.