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

I have read that urine was saved by all the family members to provide urea for this purpose of powder making.

I suppose the priest urine would be stronger due to the larger than normal consumption of alcohol by the priestly class.

Saltpeter is an oxidizer. In the movie October Sky they powered their rocket with this mixture.
I have no doubt that ignited in a confined space, it will propel a lead slug.

Pete

William Shatner can help. He defeated the Gorn using some primitive gun powder!~)

Stallones
i don't think in this case it's the PC types so much as the legal types who have stepped in and sued when high school experiments such as you describe have gone awry. Still it is a shame isn't it, things like this make science so much more fun.
Steve
BTW my wife, a school teacher, once needed a small flash and smoke spectacular for a school play. My pyrotechnic device consisting of powdered magnesium sprinkled over steel wool in a empty coffee can, ignited by two wires and a dry cell battery worked so well it scared the p--s out of the first graders in the front row and set off the school fire alarms (oops!)

Well I remember the Foxfire books as I think I stopped after buying about five. I also remember lye soap, my mother making it and me selling it door to door. She'd pour it in a cutdown cardboard box as a mold and slice it into blocks. The blocks looking like cake icing on top as she'd swirled it with a butterknife which left the icing swirls and peaks. Long before Foxfire (in the seventies) was Fur, Fish & Game. There was a magazine to encourage Dan'l Boone mischief!

jack

Way before Foxfire, my buddies and I were making Blackpowder with saltpetre, sulpher and charcoal in equal amounts. Our rocketfuel was(I think)saltpetre and sugar melted together. I don't know why we didn't blow ourselves up...Geo

Just for funzzies, I did a google search on How to make black powder. A lot of information out there in inter-nut land.

How to make black powder.

Now I just need to know how to get the right grain sizes for rifle and shotgun.

A reminder of my grandfather's wood cellar. If I sit for a while and close my eyes I can still open the door. A little oak aged ethanol on ice helps greatly. Silvers

Miller, you are right about the origin of the name of the books, Foxfire. Foxfire is a phenomenon I have seen myself at night in swampy areas of Georgia. It amounts to an eerie glow, a light of sorts that moves around in the darkness over mucky, swampy areas when conditions are right. I have never researched it, but I think I remember reading that it is actually a phosphorescent gas that emanates from rotting organic matter in wet places. I'm sure there are a many conditions that have to be right for it to occur, but it is an amazing thing to behold. Have seen it while frog gigging and bass fishing at night. OBTW, the name "foxfire" is derived from "phosphorous". Say it with a backwoods southern slur and you can see how phosphorous was mispronounced foxfire.

Black powder will keep for amazingly long periods if sealed from the environment. A friend who has been an avid WBTS artifact collector once found an unexploded shell, left over form the "former unpleasantness" of 1861-1865. He opened it and it contained a grey powder which he assumed to be some sort of black powder. He loaded a modest amount in his flintlock, and FIRED IT!! He allowed as how it was pahrful weak, though.

Stan

Stan;
There was a place in a neighboring town wher a rural road crossed a railroad in a swampy area & one night several teenagers tried to beat the train, didn't make it. Train knocked the car over in the muck killing all the kids. Sometime later someone made up the tale you could drive out there & see their headlights glowing dimly out where the kids died. It was of course these gasses of which you speak, but scared many kids to death. Another tale was started very near to where i live where "Supposedly" an old man got mad at his wife & chased her with a hatchet, catching up with her in the woods down a hollow from there house & he chopped her head off. A load of kids would be carried out there & the window cracked a little & they could here the faint "Thump" of an old hydraulic water ram pumping water from a spring up the hill to a distant house. Lots of old Southeren tales floting around. Used to be a Country Song entitled "The Brown Mountain Light" which I am sure derived from a Foxfire tale. There is however, & I feel sure very closely related, a type which you see glowing on old rotting logs on the ground which is what I have always heard referred to as Foxfire, but this probably varies according to area.