Home made black powder. Tips?

Yeah, and I can't find scrap lead or free lead otherwise I would cast.

I'm not interested in doing this for the savings alone, I think it would be a good experience to know how and perhaps I can make a powder that's as good as Swiss and it costs half that of Goex.

Might be tough to make something better, but I'll admit it would be cool to learn how to make something that works. I'd just be extremely cautious and deal with small quantities.

Salvage yard wheel weights can be a good source of cheap or even free lead but you'll have to sort out the junk zinc weights.
 
As for black powder cartridge reloading, my only issue is sourcing bullets with the correct lube. With muzzleloaders, I can use bore butter and it's no fuss, no muss.
If you do get set up casting consider paper patching. I am playing with an old .38-55 rolling block and am very pleased with the results so far.
 
Yeah, and I can't find scrap lead or free lead otherwise I would cast.

I'm not interested in doing this for the savings alone, I think it would be a good experience to know how and perhaps I can make a powder that's as good as Swiss and it costs half that of Goex.

Your not trying hard enough for lead. If you can't find lead sources hanging out with other muzzle stuffers your doing something wrong.
Know any roofers, plumbers -especially older ones? Check craigs list often? Yard sales?
Check out yard sales for fishing weights...
Heck try castboolits.com alway lead for sale there.

Making black powder is not hard. Making consistent and repeatable black powder is the trick.

Making black powder is,no more dangerous than using it out of the can. Maybe if your the type who has to have a cigarette hanging from your lips upon,every waking moment of just can't seem to keep gas and other flammable away from open flames then maybe you need not make it.

My dad had a black powder recipe pinned to the basement wine cellar door. Was out of popular mechanics IIRC. Our home made stuff was o.k. fine for plinking especially from the pistol kits from cabelas. You just can't get the bulkyness of commercial powder at home. The key is the right charcoal. The best powder we made was from charged willow and ash branches. My dad charged the branches I don't remember the actual method he used. He burned them slowly in,a small steel trash can..

Try it have fun just keep spark and flame away and you will be fine.

I don't miss grinding it up with a maple branch and a,wooden bowl. I know if I ever need to I can make some....it's not fun for me.
Now molten led is another game all together. I like melting lead. I'm,actually going to build a forge and start some sinc, bronze casting next spring.
 
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Your not trying hard enough for lead. If you can't find lead sources hanging out with other muzzle stuffers your doing something wrong.
Know any roofers, plumbers -especially older ones? Check craigs list often? Yard sales?
Check out yard sales for fishing weights...
Heck try castboolits.com alway lead for sale there.

Making black powder is not hard. Making consistent and repeatable black powder is the trick.

Making black powder is,no more dangerous than using it out of the can. Maybe if your the type who has to have a cigarette hanging from your lips upon,every waking moment of just can't seem to keep gas and other flammable away from open flames then maybe you need not make it.

My dad had a black powder recipe pinned to the basement wine cellar door. Was out of popular mechanics IIRC. Our home made stuff was o.k. fine for plinking especially from the pistol kits from cabelas. You just can't get the bulkyness of commercial powder at home. The key is the right charcoal. The best powder we made was from charged willow and ash branches. My dad charged the branches I don't remember the actual method he used. He burned them slowly in,a small steel trash can..

Try it have fun just keep spark and flame away and you will be fine.

I don't miss grinding it up with a maple branch and a,wooden bowl. I know if I ever need to I can make some....it's not fun for me.
Now molten led is another game all together. I like melting lead. I'm,actually going to build a forge and start some sinc, bronze casting next spring.
Thanks for that post, I liked reading it.

Yeah, I'm not trying to find lead at all because I have other priorities right now. I also don't know many people, nor do I care to. The people at my range aren't muzzleloader people, in fact, I'm the only person I know who enjoys black powder shooting be it in muzzleloaders or cartridges.

But bottom line on lead: if it's not free, it ain't for me.

As for black powder my goal is to figure out how to make that repeatable black powder with that bulkyness. As you said, the charcoal is the key.

Good luck with the casting. I've become interested in the prospect of zinc bullets as they're a low melting metal with decent mass.
 
So let me get this straight. The same guy who pm'd me for blackpowder cartridge advice wants to make his own blackpowder. The same guy who states that he has neither the time, space or inclination to cast his own bullets and also says that if black powder cartridge reloading is too "convoluted" he will stick to smokeless. This guy is now considering taking on one of the most time consuming, meticulous and downright dangerous endeavors in the reloading world???? Really????

And he has yet to even acknowledge my first post here advising him that he has his chemicals wrong. Oh well........

Murphy is sitting patiently just out of view, smiling his ass off.
 
Thanks for that post, I liked reading it.

Yeah, I'm not trying to find lead at all because I have other priorities right now. I also don't know many people, nor do I care to. The people at my range aren't muzzleloader people, in fact, I'm the only person I know who enjoys black powder shooting be it in muzzleloaders or cartridges.

But bottom line on lead: if it's not free, it ain't for me.

As for black powder my goal is to figure out how to make that repeatable black powder with that bulkyness. As you said, the charcoal is the key.

Good luck with the casting. I've become interested in the prospect of zinc bullets as they're a low melting metal with decent mass.

Going on memory from that old frail article my dad had pinned to the door. It takes lots of pressure to grind it down like a 1ton mill? Good luck.
If you go to some black powder events and get over your "no meeting people" thing
You will find.
1. Many people willing to help
2. Opportunity to get in on group buys
3. Free lead....lots of the older guys have more lead than they know what to do with and are willing sometimes to give some up to keep the sport going.
Like me I give some lead away for the casting seminar and to those I feel are truly interested.
If your not looking for it your not going to get it for free. Like waiting to win the lottery with out buying a ticket.
Keep us up dated.
 
Going on memory from that old frail article my dad had pinned to the door. It takes lots of pressure to grind it down like a 1ton mill? Good luck.
If you go to some black powder events and get over your "no meeting people" thing
You will find.
1. Many people willing to help
2. Opportunity to get in on group buys
3. Free lead....lots of the older guys have more lead than they know what to do with and are willing sometimes to give some up to keep the sport going.
Like me I give some lead away for the casting seminar and to those I feel are truly interested.
If your not looking for it your not going to get it for free. Like waiting to win the lottery with out buying a ticket.
Keep us up dated.

The 1 ton is more likely a reference to a press used to press a wet/damp mixture into a hockey puck like shape or brick. Those are then thoroughly dried and screened on various mesh screens to give different size granules, from "meal powder" to FFFF. Meal powder is primarily used as a lift charge in fireworks shells. Its that protruding lump on the side of round commercial fireworks shells that has the fuse coming from it.

Milling takes a tumbling ball mill with large lead balls or other non ferrous media like processed stainless steel or ceramic so no static sparks are created. None are fool proof and an isolated area should be used for composition mixes, whereas individual component chemicals are safe to mill sans isolation.

Intimate mixture is the key to good BP, and its usually done wet, then dried and screened.
 
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And he has yet to even acknowledge my first post here advising him that he has his chemicals wrong. Oh well........

Murphy is sitting patiently just out of view, smiling his ass off.
It was a misspelling. Get off your high horse before you fall and have to claim disability.
 
It was a misspelling. Get off your high horse before you fall and have to claim disability.

Well, here's a second tip for you: Misspelling names or processes doesn't cut it in chemistry.

No high horse here, I just happen to know what I'm talking about regarding the subject and you evidently don't nor will you take a serious correction. Maybe you should stick to something a little less dangerous, like mixing shades of paint instead.
 
... Maybe you should stick to something a little less dangerous, like mixing shades of paint instead.

As it develops, mixing shades of paint turns out to be QUITE dangerous.

As an anniversary surprise, I put together a booklet of paint chips that I mixed myself. There were 50 pages, with a wicked nice Corinthian leather binder and a Forward written by yours truly. Mrs. Pipes was UN amused by my 50 shades of gray. In retrospect it was not one of my better ideas.
 
As it develops, mixing shades of paint turns out to be QUITE dangerous.

As an anniversary surprise, I put together a booklet of paint chips that I mixed myself. There were 50 pages, with a wicked nice Corinthian leather binder and a Forward written by yours truly. Mrs. Pipes was UN amused by my 50 shades of gray. In retrospect it was not one of my better ideas.

[laugh2][laugh2][laugh2]....you dangerous bro!!!
 
My dad taught my brother and I how to make black powder (and flash powder and hydrogen gas) when we were kids, strictly in small quantities and under his supervision. The largest quantity we made was enough to fill a small used CO2 cylinder from an air pistol. That made quite a bang. Smaller batches went into homemade firecrackers, and were packed into the top of model rocket engines for homemade bottle-rockets/fireworks. We found flash powder to be better for firecrackers than black powder. We used store-bought fuses or model rocket igniters to avoid the dangers of homemade fuses. Extracting hydrogen from water was the most dangerous as it involved flammable gas, electricity and glassware. We were not allowed in the room when the electrolysis rig was running.

Based on that experience it seems to me the amount of time, energy and risks involved in making reloading quantities and quality of BP would outweigh any price for commercial BP I've seen.
 
... Based on that experience it seems to me the amount of time, energy and risks involved in making reloading quantities and quality of BP would outweigh any price for commercial BP I've seen.

I could be mistaken, but I thought he was just doing it as a "proof of concept", not as a regular thing.
 
I could be mistaken, but I thought he was just doing it as a "proof of concept", not as a regular thing.

my impression we are talking about small scale production for own shooting needs, not a backyard experiment to see if powder goes puff in a fire.

as someone else pointed out, making BP is easy, making it consistent is how it becomes expensive. There are many variables like humidity, material purity, mesh size of milled materials. To accomplish consistency, you need to be hyper-anal with records, not cheap out on equipment, know some chemistry and few other things to troubleshoot your production. As OP mentions, he wants control over Fs which may not be easy to achieve on demand and on tight budget. KNO3 will be a big factor on purity, does he have analytical set to determine that or is he placing an order to Aldrich?

One thing about becoming a good chemist and getting experienced is being very anal about keeping track of the process. For OPs start, I predict him making a whole lot of batches and then trying to figure out why the hell they perform so differently. After some time, it's not going to be fun, may be it will be.

BP can be finicky to handle, easy to ignite. You may mix ingredients by hand and the whole batch goes up in flames, after turd exits the body and underwear change, good luck figuring out if it was static or something got pinched. It gets old quick, but it's a free country. Best of luck to OP, but there is no recipe for experience in BP making or handling, you got to earn it and live.

If you make small, "safe" batches, it's usually not efficient. You can test powder out and load a few rounds. If you make batches bigger, the inherent ****ups will become more epic.

Even something stupid like milling, it's not simple. When you mill say charcoal, you produce x amounts of y size particles. The ratio will be different all the time etc etc etc.
 
I could be mistaken, but I thought he was just doing it as a "proof of concept", not as a regular thing.
From OP:
... Since I'm having difficultly getting real Black Powder, not substitutes, where I live, nor do I wish to pay $30 for a pound, I've been looking into making my own. That way I can not only shoot real BP, but I can do it quite inexpensively. ... Currently I'm just looking to make 3F, but in the future there are guns I have a desire to own and shoot that would require 1F and 2F powder.
Sounds pretty regular to me.
 
Looks like this thread took a turn for the worst.. black powder isn't black magic.
Reliable BP isnt hard to achieve... what I've found in my experience moisture is the critical factor..possible more then the screen size selected.

What i have found more difficult is producing vibrant colored smoke signals using potassium nitrate over the recomended potassium percolate(probabily a misspelling on my part)

YouTube says its possible, but all the forums says it isn't...
I know for a fact potassium nitrate can work with "smoke dyes"...but it's sensitive and can cause fire or a rocket engine style projectile..

Anyway the moral of the story is, research on the Internet and real world experience are two different things.
 
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From what I have been able to learn from watching the YouTube videos on making black powder is that none of the seriously failed experiments seem to make it to a completed video. That might be an oversight...or an omen!
 
Thanks for that post, I liked reading it.

Yeah, I'm not trying to find lead at all because I have other priorities right now. I also don't know many people, nor do I care to. The people at my range aren't muzzleloader people, in fact, I'm the only person I know who enjoys black powder shooting be it in muzzleloaders or cartridges.

But bottom line on lead: if it's not free, it ain't for me.

As for black powder my goal is to figure out how to make that repeatable black powder with that bulkyness. As you said, the charcoal is the key.

Good luck with the casting. I've become interested in the prospect of zinc bullets as they're a low melting metal with decent mass.

Zinc has a higher melt point of lead.
If your not finding/looking for lead your not going to find zinc.... Tell you what when i get around to sorting my next bucket you can have all the zinc. Im all for zinc bullet. I actually made some shotgun slugs out of zinc they worked fine and the velocity was much higher do to the lighter weight.
I see no problem with zinc bullets.

There has to be a black powder crew at your club but as you state. " I also don't know many people, nor do I care to"
Is a disadvantage to you as meeting and getting to know new people in the different relms of shooting is how you find things.
It took me all of one small black powder shoot to get about $30 pounds of pure lead handed to me at the end. Along with assorted pre casted bullets and different sabots to try. 30 years ago...fast forward to now one of those same guys that helped me 30 years ago is now 80 years old and gave me what he had left of his scrap soft lead over the summer along with a nice offer to buy some black powder rifles and pistols. Percusion cap stuff which i am not into. I got a 209 primer style rifle.
Its all fun and looking forward to your updates
 
If you want zinc, get some rolls of pennies. All the modern minted pennies since about 1974 are copper plated zinc
 
If you want zinc, get some rolls of pennies. All the modern minted pennies since about 1974 are copper plated zinc
after 1982 a little copper cant hurt either.....maybe just swage the pennies right into bullet?

im curious, if you melt zinc pennies will the copper plate stay in a thin film form?
 
after 1982 a little copper cant hurt either.....maybe just swage the pennies right into bullet?

im curious, if you melt zinc pennies will the copper plate stay in a thin film form?

kind of, zink inside liquifies and to get it out you need to cut each penny in half.
 
kind of, zink inside liquifies and to get it out you need to cut each penny in half.

is the plating actually thick enough in current pennies to remain intact once the zinc melts?? Its gotta be only microns thick.
 
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