bp vs. synthetics

[Mad Monk]

Daryl,

The funniest one I saw, by far, was the one patent where the guy was mixing fulminate of mercury in talc to make a propellant powder.  Making it into a dough and then breaking it up into lumps.

I could just picture that act.
Commercial technical grade talc contains roughly 5% asbestos fibers.  You can make asbestos by simply heating talc in a kiln at a high temperature to drive off the molecules of water which gives you asbestos.
Then of course there is the thing about mercury exposure with the fulminate of mercury.

The patent claimed it worked better than gunpowder and left little residue in the gun.  Now a fraction of a grain of fulminate of mercury made those old percussion caps rather corrosive in the gun.  Think of the whole charge being based on a much larger amount of fulminate of mercury.

If you set up a factory for that stuff you wouldn't have to worry about setting up a retirement plan for the production workers.

Course we could set up a plant near Port Asbestos up the road from Possum Lake and Possum Lodge.

E. Ogre

[Harnic]

I decided to try Pyrodex because it's a lot cheaper & easier to come by in these parts.  My cap & ball revolver doesn't shoot well with it at all!  I have trouble hitting a piece of letter size paper at 25 yards when using Pyrodex.  Once I burn it all up I also have a pound of 777 to play with, it works out to the same cost per shot as real powder so which ever works better will be my choice for the cap & ball.  I won't be using Pyrodex in my rifle but if 777 shoots well in the pistol I will try it on my rifle as an alternate for when I can't get real powder locally.

[Mad Monk]

Harnic,

The 777 is a good deal "stronger" than the Pyrodex.

In the cap and ball you might have gotten better accuracy with a bit of compression on the powder charge or some fairly "strong" percussion caps.

In my mule ear lock GPR the 777 and the Pyrodex showed little difference in ignition.  But in the side hammer Lyman Trade Rifle the 777 was miserable stuff to work with as far as reliable ignition goes.  Hodgdons web site data suggests no difference in ignition temperature between 777 and Pyrodex but my experience in the two different percussion ignition system designs told me that 777 was a good bit more difficult to ignite compared to Pyrodex.

With the 777 in place of Pyrodex you might want to cut your normal load by a good 10 to 15% when you start.  The 777 is stronger.

E. Ogre

[Harnic]

Harnic,

The 777 is a good deal "stronger" than the Pyrodex.

In the cap and ball you might have gotten better accuracy with a bit of compression on the powder charge or some fairly "strong" percussion caps.

In my mule ear lock GPR the 777 and the Pyrodex showed little difference in ignition.  But in the side hammer Lyman Trade Rifle the 777 was miserable stuff to work with as far as reliable ignition goes.  Hodgdons web site data suggests no difference in ignition temperature between 777 and Pyrodex but my experience in the two different percussion ignition system designs told me that 777 was a good bit more difficult to ignite compared to Pyrodex.

With the 777 in place of Pyrodex you might want to cut your normal load by a good 10 to 15% when you start.  The 777 is stronger.

E. Ogre

Mr. Ogre, my cap & ball pistol is a Ruger Old Army (fixed sights, stainless steel model) & my powder measure throws a 40 gr charge of 3f which fills the chambers.  When a ball is seated it's well compressed.  I use CCI #11 magnum caps which are the hottest percussion caps made.  I did try a 35 gr measure with a felt wad under the ball as well, but the "accuracy", was better at 40 grs.  I am going to try some Lee conicals too as I've heard they work much better with Pyrodex.  I hope that 777 & the Lee conical will shoot well in it because the velocities are incredible!  It's near "magnum" performance.

I plan to try 777 in my 50 cal fullstock flint Hawken too, with a 5-10 prime of 3f bp as suggested by Hodgdon.  Maybe a bp prime might help your Trade Rifle....  Your suggestion of a 10-15% charge reduction to start is a good one.  All of my experimentation with subs is to be prepared for the day when real black powder is priced or legislated off the shelves of gun stores.  Thanks for your input.

[Dphariss]

Mr. Ogre, my cap & ball pistol is a Ruger Old Army (fixed sights, stainless steel model) & my powder measure throws a 40 gr charge of 3f which fills the chambers.  When a ball is seated it's well compressed.  I use CCI #11 magnum caps which are the hottest percussion caps made.  I did try a 35 gr measure with a felt wad under the ball as well, but the "accuracy", was better at 40 grs.  I am going to try some Lee conicals too as I've heard they work much better with Pyrodex.  I hope that 777 & the Lee conical will shoot well in it because the velocities are incredible!  It's near "magnum" performance.

I plan to try 777 in my 50 cal fullstock flint Hawken too, with a 5-10 prime of 3f bp as suggested by Hodgdon.  Maybe a bp prime might help your Trade Rifle....  Your suggestion of a 10-15% charge reduction to start is a good one.  All of my experimentation with subs is to be prepared for the day when real black powder is priced or legislated off the shelves of gun stores.  Thanks for your input.

I would take care compressing this stuff too much. Its not BP and reacts differently.
I would think that 1/16" of compression or slightly more would be plently.
While the Ruger is very strong both these propellants have the potential for high pressures and fast pressure rise if abused.
I used to shoot 45 colt bullets and BP in an OA, gave about the performance of the 45 colt.
Dan

[arcticap]

Thanks for the insight into something that I don't have much knowledge about.
There are a couple of new powders that are only intended for use with 209 primers. One is Accurate Arms Blackhorn 209 and an even newer one is IMR White Hots which the pellets weigh 20% less than the equivalent 777 pellets.
I haven't heard if either will ignite if a primer of BP is used in a duplex load.
The Shooting Times review of the White Hot pellets does analogize it to an old time "improved brown powder" though:

In 1882, the Germans came up with "brown" powder that was perhaps the height of blackpowder development. Instead of regular charcoal, brown powder used under burnt rye straw. The result was a powder that rivaled the performance of early smokeless powders. http://www.shootingtimes.com/ammunition/ST_whitehots_122008WO/index.html

Since this brown German powder didn't use wood charcoal, was it a non-synthetic substitute? While the short description isn't comprehensive the brown powder does sound impressive. Was it any good or was it somehow flawed?

[Dphariss]

Thanks for the insight into something that I don't have much knowledge about.
There are a couple of new powders that are only intended for use with 209 primers. One is Accurate Arms Blackhorn 209 and an even newer one is IMR White Hots which the pellets weigh 20% less than the equivalent 777 pellets.
I haven't heard if either will ignite if a primer of BP is used in a duplex load.
The Shooting Times review of the White Hot pellets does analogize it to an old time "improved brown powder" though:

In 1882, the Germans came up with "brown" powder that was perhaps the height of blackpowder development. Instead of regular charcoal, brown powder used under burnt rye straw. The result was a powder that rivaled the performance of early smokeless powders. http://www.shootingtimes.com/ammunition/ST_whitehots_122008WO/index.html

Since this brown German powder didn't use wood charcoal, was it a non-synthetic substitute? While the short description isn't comprehensive the brown powder does sound impressive. Was it any good or was it somehow flawed?

AHHH.
Did it not occur to you that maybe who ever wrote this about the brown powder was perhaps....
Clueless?
Did they provide the chemical makeup of the rye straw powder? Or were they just trying to tie their advertisers product to history with some creative writing to help boost sales??? There are NUMEROUS websites, for example, that are little more that blatant advertisments for "synthetic" powders and inline "modern" MLs. These cannot be trusted as a source of facts.

Changing the carbon source in BP will not make a powder that is close to smokeless,  sorry.
If they added smokeless to it or other compounds to increase its power output then its not BP anymore.

Dan

[arcticap]

It's a well established fact that the charcoal source can make a significant difference in the potency and burning characteristics of homemade black powders.  Choosing to use pine, cedar, balsa, willow, alder or just any other plain hardwood charcoal can cause a black powder to be either more or less of a success from what I've read about making it.
So unless someone specifically knows about the actual effect of the use of unbrunt rye straw as a charcoal replacement (or in addition to), then the little that was published in the Shooting Times article may be accurate as far as unknown facts are concerned.

If they added smokeless to it or other compounds to increase its power output then its not BP anymore.

There was no mention that smokeless powder was added to make the German brown power, but only the rye straw. But even if the resultant potency of the brown powder was being exaggerated, the question still remains about its existance as a non-synthetic substitute, and if it was possibly better than regular black powder or was flawed in some way that keeps it from being produced today.

I obviously don't know many details about it, but it's not the first reference to there being a brown powder. But since it existed and this discussion about substitute powders includes why they are called synthetics when they might not all be, who does really know about it?
Could the simple substitution (or addition) of the rye straw have led to a better, an equivalent or a worse brown powder being created or not?

[Mad Monk]

arcticap,

The question of "substitute" or "synthetic" is meaningless.  This term "synthetic" has only recently come into use.

In a previous post you mentioned Western Powder's Blackhorn 209.  I took some apart.  It is basically a smokeless powders with about 17% of something else added in to tone it down and kill the normal pressure responsive burn rate seen in smokeless powders.  The IMR White Hots may also be just another type of smokeless.  It is suspected that this is a rehash of the old du Pont bulk smokeless powder.  For a number of years Hodgdon Powder had tried to find a source for something akin to the old bulk smokeless that had been made by du Pont.  When Hodgdon acquired the IMR production facility this gave them access to all of the powders du Pont ever made and the ability to make them themselves.

Neither Blackhorn 209 nor the White Hots have even a remote relationship to the Holy Black Powder.

If one were to replace normal charcoal with "unburnt rye straw" in a black powder formulation it would not work very well at all.  If unburnt rye straw were used to replace a portion of the charcoal in a normal black popwder it would only serve to slow it down.

Noble & Abel, in England in the 1860's tested some Spanish black powder that had been made with charred hemp stems.  The hemp stems being cheap waste from rope-making operations.  This hemp stem charcoal black powder was a good bit faster than C&H sporting powder. (You would not want to shoot this powder on a range frequented by law enforcement officers!!!)

Conversely,  C&H and at least one American powder company had used charred peas to sold down very fast burning sporting powders which could then be used in bp cartridge loadings with big heavy bullets.  The pea char slowed the powder down while retaining the moist-burning property of the powder and the reduced fouling with sporting powders.  The straight sporting powders created high pressures in a cartridge rifle which degraded accuracy and yielded hard fouling.

What we call "brown powder" was made with charred cocoa husks that were a waste by-product of the chocolate industry.  Used in cannon powders were fast and hot burning powders were not desired.  Trouble with the brown powder was that it was overly sensitive to frictional ignition.  Simply shaking it in a cloth bag would set it off.  It actually saw very little use in the military.  Once the military understood just how dangerous it was they ordered all stocks of it to be destroyed.


To elaborate a bit on the rye straw thing.

Let's take alder charcoal as an example.
In a sporting burn rate powder you would char the alder to a fixed carbon content of around 65%.  If you "under-burn" it to a lower fixed carbon content the burn rate of the finished powder is a good bit slower than that made with the 65% fixed carbon char.
Then as to char to a higher fixed carbon content there is a little slowing of the charcoal's burn rate.  A fixed carbon content of 70 to 75% is considered ideal in a rifle burn rate powder.  About 80% in a musket burn rate powder.  Once you hit about 85% fixed carbon content the burn rate starts to take a big dive.  To slow down cannon powders and make them burn cooler it was not unusual to char to a 90 to 95% fixed carbon content.

If you were to plot a graph of the fixed carbon content versus burn rates you get a classic bell curve graph.

I have looked at late 19th century sporting type powder out of an old Ely .295 Rook loading.  Large powder grains with a red-brown color.  Once separated from the sulfur the charcoal was brick-red in color.  In this case they charred the wood for a very long time at a low temperature.  A temperature below 280 to 290 C.

Along another line here.
We see several versions of the ascorbic acid and potassium nitrate powder.  Then we had GOEX's fruit sugar based Clear Shot powder.

Plants make ascorbic acid by modifying the basic sugar molecule.  Plant cellulose is said to be a "high-polymer" of sugar.  In plant cellulose you have sugar molecules as the basic unit of structure joined together in long "chains".  There is a great deal of variation in the number of sugar molecules forming these chains.  In plant cellulose we see the sugar molecules forming crystalline structures.  In starches the masses are not crystalline.
Not that this means anything as far as the use of the term substitute goes.  Just something of technical interest.

 

[Daryl]

arcticap,

 
Conversely,  C&H and at least one American powder company had used charred peas to sold down very fast burning sporting powders which could then be used in bp cartridge loadings with big heavy bullets.  The pea char slowed the powder down while retaining the moist-burning property of the powder and the reduced fouling with sporting powders.  The straight sporting powders created high pressures in a cartridge rifle which degraded accuracy and yielded hard fouling.

 

Ogre- thanks for that most informative post!!  I'd like to address this section if I may.  In Greener's "The Gun and it's Development" 9th edition, he shows a .450 BPE single shot with the action blown wide apart. The culprit he said, was fine Italian 'rifle' powder, presumably ML powder - this corroborates your paragraph above.

[Mad Monk]

Daryl,

Generally they credit Berthold (The Bold) as the inventor of black powder in Europe.
But what really happened was that the "technology" was picked up by the Arabs from the Chinese.  This "technology" then followed the Mediterranean trade route to Italy and Spain.  Then up into France and Germany.  Then lastly into England.  If you look at early to mid 1800's the Italians and Spanish were ahead of the rest of Europe in producing good powders.  This is part of the reason you see so much serious experimenting going on in France, Germany and England in the mid-1800's.  I am reminded of the French play on words with the English "Double Battle" powder which the French jokingly called 'Double Brutal" powder.

There was a good black powder produced in Italy until roughly 1970.  A company known as Biazi (spelling ??)  Our Aberdeen Proving ground used some of their military powder as something of a comparison standard in some of their work.

Several posts mention Red Alder in the Pacific Northwest.
The thing about using certain types of woods, such as the Glossy buckthorn Alder, in European powders relied on a source of cheap labor.  Farmers in Southern France and Northern Spain collected it in the Spring and peeled its bark as a spare change income at a time when there was little work to do on the farm.

In the Balkan states the collection of Black Alder and Glossy Buckthorn Alder is usually done by Gypsies.  They are generally excluded from the better paying jobs.  Some end up at almost a sustenance living standard.

If you were forced to pay good wages to those who would cut and peel the bark from the wood the price of this would make such wood charcoal cost prohibitive in powder production.  Besides.  It must be cut and debarked right after the sap rises in the tree in early spring.  So you have maybe a month to do it.  Then 11 months of nothing as far as wood cutting for BP goes.

I had spent a day cutting European Black Alder on a friend's farm.  Then it was almost a day to peel the bark.  Then it laid under roof for several weeks to dry.  The dry weight of the wood was a good bit less than the wet weight.
Labor intensive and not very profitable for the guy with the saw and bark peeling knife.
When Du Pont ran the original plant they had men cut the wood and then workers wives and children did the debarking for a little extra income.

E. Ogre

[arcticap]

I'm also very appreciative of Mad Monk for giving us all a peek into some of the not so obvious details about the ingredients and processes involved in making various black powders.
I do sympathize with Mad Monk for even needing to laboriously type out his responses just so that we can learn and understand.
"Thank you" for voluntarily teaching us a few fascinating lessons. 

[Daryl]

Yeah- spot-on, arcticap - ain't it great!

[Mad Monk]

I'm also very appreciative of Mad Monk for giving us all a peek into some of the not so obvious details about the ingredients and processes involved in making various black powders.
I do sympathize with Mad Monk for even needing to laboriously type out his responses just so that we can learn and understand.
"Thank you" for voluntarily teaching us a few fascinating lessons. 

arcticap,

A fair number of my writings on powder will soon be available for download, in pdf format, off a L&R web site run by a man seen on the Open Range message board.  At some point in time they may also be available off the Cody Museum web site.


E. Ogre

[Daryl]

That's wonderful, Ogre - I know a few guys will be most interested.