FLASH pan powder substitute

[Mad Monk]

I understand ... see HOW FAST they get it too you for testing.
 I remember the dry pan powder from decades back ... it did protect the powder but also made it harder for a spark to ignite.
good luck with the trials

That dry pan stuff was a jokw!  Nothing more than micro-pulverized sand.  Silica.  Used in industry as a filler in plastics and rubber.  I used it as Cabo-Sil in plastics.

It did NOT prevent moisture pick up by the powder.  It simply hid the fact.  Powder companies coat black powder grains with graphite to keep them from sticking together.  The graphite does not prevent the powder from picking up moisture.  The crystals of graphite do not form a non-porous continuous film on the surfaces of the powder grains.  The same is true of the ground sand.  Graphite is difficult, at best, to ignite.  In the case of the pan dry you are simply putting another film of crystals over the surfaces of the grains and this time the film is not combustable.

When Fuzz Fetterman first came out with his pan dry powder back in the 1980's I had to laugh.  A 40 pound bag of Cab-O-Sil is huge.  About half the size of the average refrigerator.  You get a lot of those little bottles out of one bag.  The mark up on it was huge.  Cab-O-Sil was dirt cheap.

Bill K.

[Mad Monk]

Forgot to mention.
My other use for the Cab0O-Sil was in varnishes and lacquers.  If you mix this Cab-O-Sil in with lacquer or varnish you get a nice semi-gloss finish.  The minute particles break up an otherwise perfectly flat glossy finish making it a semi-gloss finish.  Used in the cabinet lacquers some time back for just that.

When mixed with a little oil the Cab-O-Sil made a real nice polish for brass or other metal parts on a gun.  We used it in PVC compounds being run through a 4-roll calender to polish the rolls as the machine ran.

Bill K.

[Larry Pletcher]

Bill and all,
I received am email today that they will send a couple of 10 oz bottles of barrel powder and a quanity of Flash priming powder. There will be enough to do a serious "side by side" comparison with another priming powder and to do some barrel ignition timing. Steve Chapman will be working with me. Steve and I need to do some planning. Should be fun.

Regards,
Pletch

[roundball]

Strikes me that they must be pretty confident of their products...of the face of it, that encouraging

[The other DWS]

how do you check it for corrosiveness?

[ottawa]

to check for corrosives  just burn some in a piece of barrel and let it set for a day or two after just a quick wiping and and see how it fairs ? just an idea .

[Larry Pletcher]

Steve and I will not try to deal with corrosive properties.  We want valid comparisons with BP as a primer.  I see this as a 3 phase experiment:

How fast is Flash in igniting in a pan?

How well does it ignite a barrel charge of BP?

How well does it ignite BlackMag barrel powder?

In each of these we will try side-by-side comparisons with real BP.

As to the corrosive properties,  The lock I'll be using is so much an old friend that we'll do all we can to clean it properly.  In most cases we clean equipment every 10 shots or so to prevent fouling from being a factor.

As a side bar: we change flints far more often than a normal shooter would.  You guys often see how many shots you can get from a flint.  We want to swap flints before it affects the times, if possible.  (I have a bag of flints from 20+ years of timing that probably have many shots left, but were swapped out to eliminate the flint edge as a variable.

Regards,
Pletch

[Daryl]

Easiest way to compare corrosiveness, quick and dirty test, is to flash BP on one surface a couple times, then the 'other' stuff on another surface, then let them sit for a couple days.

When I used the Chlorate/sulfer/charcoal for caps, the barrel around the nipple rusted and looked to be finely pitted like a  & 150 year old gun. That took only 2 or 3 days.