doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Homemade Powder

Not to rain on your parade... but... a quick Google of 'explosive license' brings up some DOJ material that appears to indicate that 'manufacturers' of BP require a federal explosives license.

Harpoons and line throwing for breeches buoy must require really slow stuff. Does the F stand for "fine"? And then finer, superfine, superduperfine?

jack

There is a fairly recent book, 'Black Powder Manufacturing, Testing & Optimizing' [2003] by Ian von Maltitz that covers the whole of small scale BP issues. I believe it contains some granulation charts as well. You may be able to source it through Dave Webber, but you'd have to ask him about that .. I know Dave can get some books.

I also made a request of Royal Powder Mills in England to send a chart if they would. They are an active maker of back powder with a long history and an active educational programme. It will be interesting to see how closely it matches Miller's chart if they respond & I think they shall.

I'm not a BP shooter personally, but find the subject of interest .. and also strongly agree w/JT's early admonitions.

edit: Shotgun's remark is also something that I see ref'd when reading BP articles hither & yond on the web. The firecracker crowd is into BP also and much in tune with staying between the lines .. and there are rules and regs regarding BP

Also I have found very interesting article about different BP's including Brown one in very old Russian magazine. I got scans, but not ready to traslate it

Many, Many thanks for the above information, that was exactly what I was after.

As to a licence for the manufacturer of black powder, I have no intention of manufacturing black powder, I plan on making black powder for my own use. BIG DIFFERENCE.

I have seen a number of harpoon guns both old and new. They are all vary heavy as they launch a vary heavy projectile and need to be heavy! The reason for canon powder being so much larger than what we would use is to generate more pressure for the heavy projectile.

tw: I found the book on abe's site and will get an order out, thank you.

Interesting discussion. BTW, byZed and others, "stale" is an old word for urine (As in "the mare stood and staled.") Saltpeter is derived from urine by removing the water, either by letting it evaporate or by boiling it off. So you could get saltpeter by putting "stale" in a flat pan in the sun and letting it get stale, so to speak.

I remember during the Korean War reading (I was about nine) about the revolt of North Korean and Chinese POWs on a prison island off the coast of Korea. They made crude guns and bombs powered by home-made black powder, using the "stale urine" method. Don't know where they got the sulphur. Hell of a mess for a while.

In the "more things change the more they get the same" dept., I recently read of a local kid injured by a rock in an IED explosion in Iraq. I then remembered one of our manuals in ROTC showing how to make a "rock fougasse" (sp?) out of any military or engineering explosive and stones, basically a roadside bomb using rocks for shrapnel. (As a lifer friend of mine in the 1960s once said to me: "Killing people is so easy. What's REALLY hard is living with 'em.")

That's interesting, I can't find a reference as clear as stated above, but OED does give the origin of stale as "...describing beer in the sense of 'clear from long standing' ". So I read "stale urine" to mean "old, stinking rancid urine", when "settled urine" or "urine that has done set awhile" is probably more faithful to the old meaning you refer to.
...and as for the flat pan in the sun, my kids think I'm a little strange already, so if it doesn't work hidden under the porch, I'll have to settle for store-bought saltpeter.

No permits needed to make BP or any other pyro mixture as long as it is NOT IN COMMERCE. 3,000 amateur pyros will be in Fargo, ND next month for competition in homemade shells, rockets, comets, tourbillions, mines, etc. The Grand Public Display on the 10th will be a sight to behold as usual!

It is amazing to me that the brainwashed illiterate public who will believe just about anything will read your post and think you are wrong. This is why I tell people to home school their children.

That may be re: the amateur pyrotechnists but how does that reconcile with gov't regs that limit a powder charge in a hommade shell so it doesn't become a destructive device? Sounds like a fine line to walk in today's culture. How do the authorities know it's an amateur pyro versus someone bent on ill?