Zloty Stok powder in the US?

[DavidC]

I heard a tongue in cheek claim that Zloty Stok powders, Europe's oldest supplier out of Poland, was going to be distributing in the US but I can't find anything to verify that claim. Anyone know anything more about their product or its availability? They claim to be operating since the late 17th century so they're definitely more competent than Hodgdon.

[ghostdncr]

I've recently heard the same rumor but like you, have been unable to confirm. Zloty Stok seems to be a very well regarded powder overseas but has zero market penetration here in the states. I'd certainly buy it, were it to become available.

[Eric Kettenburg]

I'd buy some just because of the catchy name!

[ghostdncr]

I sent them an email the other day asking about this particular rumor but haven't heard back. They may ignore me completely -OR- be running days behind on correspondence like seemingly everyone else...

[Mad Monk]

Yesterday I spent the day on the search engine DuckDuckGo looking at this Zloty Stok powder company.
It is part of a large investment company in Poland that operates a number of businesses.  Grupa Zloty Stok.

The powder plant itself dates back to the late 1600s.  This Zloty Stok is actually an area of Poland close to the border with the Czech border border.  The area has seen gold mine operations for at least 1000 years and that tells me the plant was originally built to make black powder blasting powders for use in the gold mines.  The area is noted for tourism.  Beautiful mountains.  Mountain biking being a big part of the tourists industry along with winter skiing.

The company web page is big and colorful. They did not give an actual location of the powder plant so that I could look it over from aerial views as to size and layout.

They claim: "to be one of the worlds leading producers of black powder, exporting it to many countries around the world."  Only recently became available in England being sold by the shooting supply house known as Henry Krank.

One ML message board showed "Martin in Belgium" shooting it and stating it is not quite as good as the Swiss powder.  Nobody I know in Australia or New Zealand has ever heard of it or seen any of it.  Nothing out of Canada or the U.S. 

So the question would be who in the U.S. would import some.  Some years back we had two U.S. fireworks companies importing small amounts of black powder from overseas.  One brought in 1 container of WANO before WANO started on the Schuetzen brand powder.  Another brought in illegally a shipment of bp out of China which in the end did nothing more than raise our powder costs due to additional regulations on black powder distribution.

Nothing I could find in my searching back up the claim by Zloty Stok on this world wide distribution claim.

If you go on You Tube and punch that powder name into the search you get a long line of vids.  A few showing shooters using it in Poland.  One vid shows a line of shooters with percussion ignition long guns shooting it off their firing line benches.  Then a few vids showing it being used for testing in cap and ball revolvers.  But either no sound at all or in Polish.

I went away from the search with the gut feeling that the company web site left out a lot about the company and the plant.  Look at the history of that area in the 1900s.  Invaded by the Nazi's.  Private ownership of any firearms prohibited.  Same after Russia kicked the Nazi's out and the communists took over.  So during those two periods of times this plant would have made military powder and small amounts of fireworks powders for the local in favor with the politicians.  Last year the powder plant was looking for a new plant manager.  Scouring Europe for someone with any experience or background in the operation of a BP plant. 

This is a thing where time will tell.  Is anybody in the U.S. willing to invest in an importing business to bring some into the U.S.     

[MuskratMike]

Way too early to give up on GOEX. I am positive they will find a qualified buyer who wants to continue the legacy.

[Osprey]

I would love to see this!  One thing is that one set of my great grandparents, Pop and Busha, immigrated from Poland.  Remember them well and fondly from my earliest years.  I would shoot Zloty with pride.  Two, as I hope to go to Poland to hunt someday it's nice to know there should be powder over there!   

[DavidC]

Mike, it's likely to be near a year or more before goex resumes operations and even then perhaps not at peak production. Their efforts may lean toward building supply for military use so who knows how long goex will be irrelevant to us shooters.

We can blame it on hodgdon (because it was their fault) but the goex plant was clearly run poorly or suffering from some production line issues for all the incidents it has had in recent years.

I spoke to a distributor in VA and his sales contact with goex stated they were at 8 million lbs annually at peak but had been around 3 million for a few years.

I suspect whoever bought goex has more work than just staffing to keep their hair thin.

[Bob Roller]

IF high quality powder is available from the Swiss why worry about some obscure mill in Eastern Europe that few in the USA ever heard of.I have been involved with black powder since 1951 and this is the first time I ever heard of Zloty Stok.Poland has been dragged over smouldering coal beginning in 1939 when Hitler flattened it and again when the Russians flattened Hitler.The only change seemed to be was to one group of devils to another,and the Hakenkreuz for the Hammer and Scycle. .
Bob Roller

[Mad Monk]

Mike, it's likely to be near a year or more before goex resumes operations and even then perhaps not at peak production. Their efforts may lean toward building supply for military use so who knows how long goex will be irrelevant to us shooters.

We can blame it on hodgdon (because it was their fault) but the goex plant was clearly run poorly or suffering from some production line issues for all the incidents it has had in recent years.

I spoke to a distributor in VA and his sales contact with goex stated they were at 8 million lbs annually at peak but had been around 3 million for a few years.

I suspect whoever bought Goex has more work than just staffing to keep their hair thin.

I would question the comment out of the distributor in VA regarding those production figures.   The maxium production capacity of the Minden plant was determined by the number and size of the wheel mills in operation.  When GOEX abandoned the Moosic plant they left the three du Pont designed 10-ton mills behind.  They could no longer find anybody who could replace the babit bearing in those big mills.  Those 10-ton mills ran a batch size of about 350 pounds of powder in one milling cycle. Some powders were run for 2 hours.  Other powders, such as our rifle type powder spent 3 hours in a wheel mill.  It was strictly a one shift a day operation.  When they set up the Minden plant they set it up with 3 wheel mills brought over from a defunct plant in South Africa.  These are Krupp built 5-ton wheel mills.   GOEX quickly found that if they ran the normal batch size of a 5-ton mill they would quickly go broke.  They found max batch size in the 5-ton mills to be around 300 pounds.   No way could they have put out 8 million pounds a year out of that plant and to get 3 million pounds they would have had to run the mills 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

[Mad Monk]

IF high quality powder is available from the Swiss why worry about some obscure mill in Eastern Europe that few in the USA ever heard of.I have been involved with black powder since 1951 and this is the first time I ever heard of Zloty Stok.Poland has been dragged over smouldering coal beginning in 1939 when Hitler flattened it and again when the Russians flattened Hitler.The only change seemed to be was to one group of devils to another,and the Hakenkreuz for the Hammer and Scycle. .
Bob Roller

Bob,

We saw this when GOEX shut down Moosic and started to import the KIK-Kamnik powder from Slovenia. In 1998 GOEX brought over a little over 1 million pounds of powder from KIK to hold them over until Minden was up and running.  At that time KIK had recently been privatized.  When the Communists took over those Eastern European countries from the Nazis the plants were all converted over to military powder.  KIK-Kamnik specialized in fine grain black powder used in hand grenades and grenade fuses and black powder used in land mines.  So to make powder for the U.S. market GOEX had to send a rep over to Slovenia to teach them ho to make a rifle burn rate black powder.  So in sections of Europe you had first the Nazis running the BP plants and the later the Communists took over.  So they have no long uninterrupted history of producing good small arms black powders as been seen in the U.S.

[Bob Roller]

Mike, it's likely to be near a year or more before goex resumes operations and even then perhaps not at peak production. Their efforts may lean toward building supply for military use so who knows how long goex will be irrelevant to us shooters.

We can blame it on hodgdon (because it was their fault) but the goex plant was clearly run poorly or suffering from some production line issues for all the incidents it has had in recent years.

I spoke to a distributor in VA and his sales contact with goex stated they were at 8 million lbs annually at peak but had been around 3 million for a few years.

I suspect whoever bought Goex has more work than just staffing to keep their hair thin.

I would question the comment out of the distributor in VA regarding those production figures.   The maxium production capacity of the Minden plant was determined by the number and size of the wheel mills in operation.  When GOEX abandoned the Moosic plant they left the three du Pont designed 10-ton mills behind.  They could no longer find anybody who could replace the babit bearing in those big mills.  Those 10-ton mills ran a batch size of about 350 pounds of powder in one milling cycle. Some powders were run for 2 hours.  Other powders, such as our rifle type powder spent 3 hours in a wheel mill.  It was strictly a one shift a day operation.  When they set up the Minden plant they set it up with 3 wheel mills brought over from a defunct plant in South Africa.  These are Krupp built 5-ton wheel mills.   GOEX quickly found that if they ran the normal batch size of a 5-ton mill they would quickly go broke.  They found max batch size in the 5-ton mills to be around 300 pounds.   No way could they have put out 8 million pounds a year out of that plant and to get 3 million pounds they would have had to run the mills 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

In 1985 I worked in a babbit bearing shop that had a VTL (Vertical Turret Lathe) thay could have bored that bearing and we poured some really big ones.
Bob Roller

[AZshot]

Two assumptions I have.  Black Powder would be made in small scale plants to match the smaller need today?  And that smokeless is a totally different process (extruded or whatever), and those plants cannot make Black Powder?

[Mad Monk]

Two assumptions I have.  Black Powder would be made in small scale plants to match the smaller need today?  And that smokeless is a totally different process (extruded or whatever), and those plants cannot make Black Powder?

Exactly!  Smokeless is nitrated cellulose dissolved in a solvent out through a die into water where the solvent is removed.  That is the quick way of describing it.  When you look at the history of black powder manufacturing here in the mid-Atlantic states you see little single man or two "plants" in rural areas.  We have a powder mill road outside of Reading.  Some guy with a farm and his son made small batches of hunting powder in his spare time to supplement his farm income.

North of here at Schuylkill Haven there was a small BP plant that made shooting powders for the locals in Northern Berks County and Southern Schuylkill County.  In my younger days I hiked the mountain near where the old plant was located looking at all of the old charcoal pits.  Since they did not make blasting powders du Pont left them alone and did not buy them out or burn them down when du Pont started to take over that area.  Du Pont even sold them sulfur and purified potassium nitrate to help them stay in business into the late 1800s.

At one time there were a host of small black powder plants up North of here serving the anthracite coal mines. Then when Lammot du Pont put together the "powder Trust" the plants were bought up.  Those who refused to sell were subject to week end fires when everybody was away from the plant.   

To put together a small plant today is nearly impossible.  Try finding a working wheel mill.  The other machinery you will have to hand build.  And good luck dealing with state environmental officials.
A good friend of mine tried that in Australia back in the 1980s.  The territory govt. shot that down.  He had a small wheel mill and a 5-ton wheel mill plus a real powder press.  They kept fining ways to tell him no even though his property was 40 acres out in the bush.

[Daryl]

Bill - that is typical thinking of the Colonial-Politician line of thought.
Can't have anyone making explosives, now, can we. They might blow
us up.

[Mad Monk]

Bill - that is typical thinking of the Colonial-Politician line of thought.
Can't have anyone making explosives, now, can we. They might blow
us up.

Daryl,

Got into that when I was doing some work as a consultant to the main ATF forensic chemistry lab in Virginia.  They had no idea as to the extent of the chemicals variation in the commercially prepared black powders. The guy I was working with came out of a small town close to where I live.  He had worked in a factory that made iron pipe and he worked in their lab.  So once into the ATF and some college They put him in charge of the improvised explosive device team.  In our talks he commented on how many higher ups in the ATF did not want civilians to have any access to black powder.  And it was that same team that some years ago tried to claim that we who built the repro flintlocks and percussion guns were gun manufacturers and should be licensed and taxed as such.

[Daryl]

Same as here, Bill.  Here, it is illegal to be in possession of any explosives or to make them, without Federal license to do so.

[Bob Roller]

Ihad a friend that was a BATF agent for years and he thought it was a hoot when some moron that had murder in their resume' and had their device go off in their face was poetic justice.I heartily agree. I think he helped investagate a NYC bomb that went off and took 3 of their upstanding criminals with it.A German friend who was also a cop heard a big blast at a festival and it was one of their idiots that had his bomb go off while planting it in a garbage can. NO identifible remains.Way to GO!!!!!.No other casualties reported
Bob Roller

[mountainman70]

Nothin like a preee mature Detonation ,Bob. Thanks for the laff. Best regards, Dave F

[Mad Monk]

Ihad a friend that was a BATF agent for years and he thought it was a hoot when some moron that had murder in their resume' and had their device go off in their face was poetic justice.I heartily agree. I think he helped investagate a NYC bomb that went off and took 3 of their upstanding criminals with it.A German friend who was also a cop heard a big blast at a festival and it was one of their idiots that had his bomb go off while planting it in a garbage can. NO identifible remains.Way to GO!!!!!.No other casualties reported
Bob Roller

Bob,

The term would be, Hoist With His Own Petard!

[Bob Roller]

I call it retroactive birth control
Bob Roller

[DavidC]

Has anyone heard any more on this topic? Poland to the rescue?

[Mad Monk]

Has anyone heard any more on this topic? Poland to the rescue?

No.  But I am taking no chances.  Now when the wife cooks me a batch of Konopelski keilbasa I will save the grease drippings the proper patch lube to be used with that powder.

[Panzerschwein]

IF high quality powder is available from the Swiss why worry about some obscure mill in Eastern Europe that few in the USA ever heard of.I have been involved with black powder since 1951 and this is the first time I ever heard of Zloty Stok.Poland has been dragged over smouldering coal beginning in 1939 when Hitler flattened it and again when the Russians flattened Hitler.The only change seemed to be was to one group of devils to another,and the Hakenkreuz for the Hammer and Scycle. .
Bob Roller

Great summary, Bob.

I don’t see a reason to buy from or support any no name, questionable ex-soviet powder company when we’ve got the excellent and well established powders coming out of Germany.

[Mike from OK]

Bring it on. I welcome anyone who gives me another option for the products I use.

Mike