Home made powder

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C7AR15

New member
I'm sure this question has been asked before, so there .:cool:

Has anybody ever made their own smokeless powder ??

I've been looking at the history of gunpowder from Black to smokeless. There is a lot of chemistry involved here ! YIKES:confused:

Tougher than I thought.

Anybody ever made a black or smokeless powder and loaded a round and shot it ? That would be impressive. JD
 
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Slamfire

New member
The book, Ammunition making by George Frost, https://www.amazon.com/Ammunition-making-insiders-George-Frost/dp/0935998578 has everything you need to know to make gunpowder and primers. After reading how, I expect you will figure out, you don't want to.

Smokeless gunpowder is best left to industrial complexes that have the machines and resources to reduce the risk of an explosion. During the early days of smokeless gunpowder, many production workers were killed by accidents.
 
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Yosemite Steve

New member
I made black powder, nitrocellulose flake powder and sugar based rocket propellant. If you have the time and determination you can do it. It's a good challenge. Best done away from people and distractions... kind of like hand loading, but more sketchy. I used the powder in a friend's muzzle loader, but it was originally made for experimental rocketry. Good times!
 
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cdoc42

New member
I was probably 14 years old, I don't remember, but chose that age just because it represents that time when a teen is most likely to try stuff like this. I bought charcoal, powdered sulfur and "Saltpeter" (Potassium nitrate) from 3 different pharmacies (but I probably wasn't fooling anyone) and arbitrarily mixed one third of each together. I stuffed the mixture, interrupted at times by match heads, into an old top of a fountain pen. I made a fuse by soaking cotton string in alcohol, then rubbing it in the Saltpeter. I affixed my "rocket" to a platform made from popsicle sticks, and lit the fuse. Rather than reaching heights close to the moon, it just ejected this impressive (to me) linear fireball, very similar to then current "Flowerpot" fireworks, and once rather immediately exhausted, my rocket simply fell off the ramp. I escaped rapidly into our house to avoid being implicated in filling the yard with black, sulfur-infused smoke.......20 years later I entered the world of handloading but I have never had the inclination to repeat my rocket experiment.....
 
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C7AR15

New member
reply

I toured the Waltham Abbey gunpowder mill in the UK, a heritage site now.

The workers were given coveralls with no pockets, so as not to carry ANYTHING that might spark.
Stairs covered in Elephant skin for no sparking.

Also - many buildings doing the same thing, in case one blows up you don't lose the whole team !!

It definitely leaves you thinking about how dangerous the production of gunpowder was/is ??
 
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Slamfire

New member
I need to add, I have an older Gun Digest where the author of one article, mentioned that he has hooks for hands, because of gunpowder making experiments he conducted as a kid.
 
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std7mag

New member
I've made black powder and napalm.
Back when i was younger, more stupid, and immortal.

Boiling gasoline is not for the faint of heart.
 
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Unclenick

Staff
The stupidity theme is what runs through most all gunpowder making. The smokeless powders require process controls beyond what the average person can manage, and solvents that put the overall safety level about on par with running a meth lab. And even if you get past all that, keep in mind that the professionals are still only able to keep a lot of powders inside a ±15% burn rate control range and have to resort to blending with other faster or slower lots to get it consistent enough for load data to be valid.

Black powder making in small quantities is a lot safer, but still subject to stupid handling. One of the old Firefox books covered it, including making your own charcoal and saltpeter. Sulfur has to be mined or purchased. And in the end, the finished product is inferior to manufactured black powder.
 
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Jim Watson

New member
Mythbusters made guncotton, I will try to find the episode... it is apparently a sideline to the Confederate Rocket program.

Later they nitrated a pair of overalls looking for a route to "exploding pants." It didn't work.
 
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Unclenick

Staff
Yeah, you need the right grade acid, the right acid ratio maintained through the reaction and a way to pull heat out of the solution. You get cellulose hex, tetra, and mono-nitrates in various ratios that depend on how well you control those parts of it. In my high school days I made GC, too, for chemistry class by nitrating J&J bandage cotton, but I also tried paper and rags. I remember the cotton vanished when lit (flash paper is the same thing) and it smelled like the exhaust from a glo-plug engine running with the standard model airplane fuel of the day. The paper worked pretty well. The cloth left a lot more oily black ash, but in small quantities, it worked, too.

I don't know where the Mythbusters screwed up, but I recall seeing them make significant mistakes with a number of their ballistics experiments, so I'm not surprised. You don't know what you've proved if you don't know that what you've done is good enough to prove it. They typically lacked that cross-check.
 
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Yosemite Steve

New member
solvents that put the overall safety level about on par with running a meth lab
Click to expand...

Funny. My neighbor peeked over the fence one day while I was in the back yard stirring some sugar propellant in a hot plate with a nomex apron and a full face shield and welding gloves. I found myself explaining what I was doing so he wouldn't think I was cooking meth. I will say that that was far safer that making the nitrocellulose which would had a much lower flash point and far higher burn rate. I made it for a more reliable parachute ejection charge. Black powder is much safer! I believe that using test motors for rockets would work well for developing smokeless powder to use in guns. You can find burn rates fairly safely by loading up a test motor and measuring the time it takes to burn, the nozzle size and the diameter of the nozzle throat and doing the math. As Unclenick said, batch consistency would be a major hurdle. The only way to keep it right would be to make large enough batches to jeopardize yourself AND your neighbors.

I had a test area in my back yard that was more or less a small blast shelter so that shrapnel from exploding rocket motors could not escape. If you decide to engage in this activity expect to have your name on a watch list.

If you go to Richard Nakka's site:http://www.nakka-rocketry.net/ and go down to the propellant section, there is good information on how to determine burn rate.
 
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F. Guffey

New member
We did not have enough stuff to carry on a war so DuPont made a deal the with the English, The deal did not last long enough for DuPont to get a boat load, seems we as in the US ruffed up a couple of passengers when they removed them from an English ship. etc.

After that we did not have smokeless powder, DuPont took a trip overseas, he went to work for a company that manufactured smokeless powder, it was not long after that he returned with a formula; JUST IN TIME FOR ANOTHER WAR! There was Spain, Poncho and WW1, and I wondered; Did DuPont inform the powder manufacturer he was in the business of making gun powder?

Winchester decided to make rifles for smokeless powder but they had a problem; the problem was John Browning, he would not allow the Model 94 to be released until 1895, Browning went to the patent office and found nickel. Springfield did not discover nickel until the 20s.

F. Guffey
 
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T. O'Heir

New member
"...Mythbusters made guncotton..." Those two can't make toast. Their idea of being a "gun guy" is growing up on a farm. Neither of 'em know spit about firearms or propellants. Mind you, gun cotton(aka Nitrocellulose) is just nitroglycerin soaked cotton.
You won't be making smokeless in the basement. Too many really nasty chemicals involved. Smokeless has bags of assorted chemicals in it to create and control the burn speed.
BP, being a low grade EXPLOSIVE, is different. It was 'homemade' in the Middle Ages with every locale having their own blend. None of which was 1/3 part each. The components tended to settle out into the specific gravity based layers during transport too.
 
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