Been almost all Goex for over 40 years. Shot a can of Elephant in the 80s for a review (guess they didn't like my opinion). On a trip a couple of summers ago and ran out of Goex so bought a can of Swiss 1 1/2. Shot about the same as my FFg.
This year I won several cans of Schutzen and am now practicing/evaluating it at the same time. When in a big match I'll be shooting the Goex FFg w 4F prime due to great confidence in that combination.
TC
Regarding your comment: "(guess they didn't like my opinion)".
The first container into the U.S. of Elephant out of Brazil came in around 1991. The owner of a company known as Petro-Explo was started by a man who came up from Brazil with $50 in his pocket. Started out as an accountant for Gearhart-Owen. Figured out a way to ship detonators with a high degree of safety. Then went off on his own and formed this Petro-Explo company.
He agreed to test market the first container of Elephant for the people running the plant in Brazil. Nobody at Petro-Explo had any background or knowledge of black powder and how it should behave in a gun. When I tested a can out of that container I fired off a letter to them telling them why it was not as good as GOEX in the gun but it could be improved to compete with GOEX. I had watched how GOEX's Moosic, PA plant was going down the tubes and how GOEX was being managed. The idea that we BP shooters depended entirely on a source that was very close to going out of business was a bit unsettling. When you look at that old Moosic, PA black powder plant between 1990 and 1997 you see it out of production for roughly half that time period. Others in the industry were looking at a possible closure of the plant in 1990-91. By 1992 WANO, in Germany, set up a U.S. company to import WANO into the U.S. A man by the name of Stew Fisher was in charge of that. He and I spent some time together on that project. But the powers to be at WANO refused to consider changes in their powder to make it better suited to the U.S. market.
The S/A Pernambuco Powder Factory, in Brazil, agreed to makes changes in their product to better suit the U.S. market. In some runs they did good. Other runs not so good. But from 1991 to roughly the year 2000 the Elephant imports into the U.S. sort of saved the day for U.S. bp shooters. By 1994-95 GOEX was having one "incident" a year that would shut them down for 6 months at a time. The pattern was an incident then a 6 month shutdown then about 6 months of production before another incident. Party of that rests on the government in Pennsylvania. The then Department of Natural Resources. GOEX would have to rebuild a piece of machinery and then wait for the state to give them approval to start it back up. Even if it only took 2 or 3 weeks to rebuild the piece of machinery they would make you wait 5 to 6 months for an approval to restart it.
When GOEX started the then new plant up at Minden, Louisiana they ended up importing roughly 8 million pounds of black powder into the U.S. to make up for what they were unable to produce.
From 1990 until roughly 2000 there would have been serious shortages of black powder in the U.S. without Elephant and the KIK GOEX brought in from Slovenia. The single container of KIK for shooters was only a fraction of what they brought in from KIK in Slovenia that went to other shooters. While Elephant was never all that it could be it saved the day for a number of years when GOEX could not begin to supply the market in the U.S.
