Socking Black Powder

[DICKH]

       I was looking around on the American Single Shot Rifle Association Site and
in the reloading forum a guy was telling about socking powder.
     
        You pour a can of black powder in a long cotton athetic or hunting sock
close the top. Hold top and bottom of sock an rock it back and forth to remove
fines from the powder,said that the fines stick to the cotton and clean your powder.

        Something new or has it been around for a long time?

        Richard Henderson


   

[hanshi]

First time I've ever heard of that; but it does sound like it would work.

[T*O*F]

It's been around for a long time.  I think that most of the "fines" are actually graphite residue from when the powder was glazed.

[EC121]

Some people used to screen the powder through loose weave material or dribble the powder in front of a fan and let the fines blow out.  Probably wasted time either way.  You will just make more fines from handling the powder can and horn plus crushing the grains while loading.

[smylee grouch]

I know some die hard slug gun and heavy bench shooters that sift the fines out before they measure and load their powder vial's. I dont think it would help off hand shooters much, not me anyway. 

[Sharpsman]

Useless as teats on a boar hog!

[snapper]

If I remember right from my college animal science days, number of teats on a boar are around 25%-30% hereditary, so they are of importance....

I know a guy that has or does sock his powder, he also puts it in the oven at low temp. to remove any residual moisture that he thinks might be there.

I try to be a serious 1,000 yard shooter, if I thought that it would help my shooting I would do it. 

I dont do it.  The guy that has or still does, he is a very good shooter and can beat me on any given day, but the past few years I can beat him a regular basis.

I have never tried it, so I am just guessing.

I think there are other ways that you can improve your shooting with bigger pay offs.

Fleener

[JBJ]

A sock? Dribbling in front of a fan. PLEASE! If you really wanted to control the size of the powder and segregate grain sizes, you would get a set of American Standard precision sieves. Mad Monk can weigh in and tell you the cuts that are used by industry and you can take it from there. Once sorted, I doubt that you would want to bung your powder in a horn and start the process of creating more "fines".
J.B.

[Bob Roller]

Back in the days when I was almost living at a shooting range I got good groups
by consistent loading from one shot to the next.Never once thought about redoing my
powder supply. I shot BPCR for a while and enjoyed the time I was doing it but it
almost became a second career keeping bullets moulded,cases ready,deprime,prime and weigh powder
charges and then drop tube it into a case. Playing with different lubes was another item.
After Ralph Marcum had to stop having BPCR shoots in McKee ky I sold my rifles and quit altogether.

Bob Roller

[Hungry Horse]

I occasionally screen my black powder. Not because I think powder dust, and small granules, are going to mess up my shooting. I'm just too cheap to buy a can of 4F for the one small rifle I own that seems to require it for good ignition.

  Hungry Horse

[Sharpsman]

Back in the days when I was almost living at a shooting range I got good groups
by consistent loading from one shot to the next.Never once thought about redoing my
powder supply. I shot BPCR for a while and enjoyed the time I was doing it but it
almost became a second career keeping bullets moulded,cases ready,deprime,prime and weigh powder
charges and then drop tube it into a case. Playing with different lubes was another item.
After Ralph Marcum had to stop having BPCR shoots in McKee ky I sold my rifles and quit altogether.

Bob Roller

  Let's add a couple more:

Cutting patches

Rolling patches!

For 20 years....it wore me out also!! ML a lot more fun and way less time spent! 

[hanshi]

I've never worried about "fines" and still don't.  I just use the powder as-is and get more than satisfactory accuracy.  I'm lazy and any extra steps that involve my physical presence are a waste of time,  IMO.

[wattlebuster]

I would rather spend that time shooting the powder than sifting it. Seems that it would be put to some use then

[Mad Monk]

Socking the black powder goes back to around the late 1980s.  At that time there was a problem with excessively dusty lots of black powder.  When the black powder is "polished" in the rotating tumbling barrels sharp edges are broken off.  This gives a lot of powder dust that is not removed.  Other brands or lots of black powder would have an excessive amount of loose graphite in the powder.  The graphite does not burn during powder combustion and only served to dirty up the more and make it far more difficult to clean.  Cleaning patches would keep coming back grey in color which would lead one to believe the bore was not clean.  Loose powder dust detracts from accuracy if you are shooting in competition. If gives what might be called a non-uniform ignition of the charge.  In excess it gives wild ignition spikes in the pressure curves.
Back in the 1800s, when British produced black powder they would "reel"it after corning and polishing.  these reels looked like big fly fishing reels with cloth suspended to form the drum.  the powder would be tumbled in the reels and the fabric would pick up and hold any powder dust.  these pieces of cloth forming the reel would then be washed and dried for reuse.

So the socking of the powder was simply a customer's way of "reeling" the powder he purchased.  Take a long sock like an athletic sock.  pour some powder into it.  twist the top end shut.  Then hold the sock in outstretched hands and rock it.  getting the powder to slide or tumble from one end of the sock to the other.  The cloth will pick up and hold any dust.  it will also remove most of the graphite from the surfaces of the grains.  Graphite serves utterly no useful purpose in the powder in the gun.  The graphite coating is little more than a processing aid to get the powder to flow faster during packaging.  It in no way protects the powder from moisture.  It some cases it is little more than a way of hiding what is otherwise a poorly made powder where the mfg. was not critical of the purity of the saltpeter they were using.  Acting much like the anti-blocking additives in common table salt.

[thecapgunkid]

You're not smoking when you do all this and stuff black powder into the oven right? 

Boom?

[Mad Monk]

What we are dealing with here was discussed at length about 20 years ago.  The black powders available to us now are a great improvement over what was available back in the late 1980's through about the year 2000.  Once the market became competitive in the early 1990's there was a push to produce better powders just to stay in the market.  Some lots of different brands were very dirty to handle.  Excess loose graphite.  Excess powder dust clinging to the individual grains of powder.  Some lots with a high moisture content.  As the various suppliers cleaned up their acts to stay in the market it no longer was of any benefit to work on the powder before using it.

Who would get into that were mainly the competitive target shooters who needed an edge.

[JohnnyFM]

Well, I think the edge was mo' "mental" than real.  Like ball players.  They have their rituals to keep a mental edge.  Like not washing their socks when they're on a hitting streak, etc.  Don't ask me how I know that....
Just my ha' penny's worth.

[hanshi]

When I first saw the thread title, my first thought was, "why punch a can of powder"?