First Very Good Black Powder

[Pyrostar]

Hi

As nearly every one of you know that I have finished my ball mill,
I have made some BP with it.

The BP is very good and I am really satisfied with the ressults.
All the BP batches were milled for roughly one hour.

Here is plain meal powder:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZRO0COye04o

And here is a 5g pile of corned BP:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ksGHxVNFJis

it may sound odd, but to corn it, I added a bit of water to the BP, stick it to the walls of the jar, and ball milled it for 2 hours.
Then I got a extremely hard chunk of the BP, and I needed to smack the BP-chunk with a hammer, because it was so hard.
The BP grains were 2-3mm big.

I would be glad about a few comments.

Greets,

Pyrostar

[User1]

How that must feel great.
It is such a lovely feeling that all the efford finaly shows it is worth it.
Nice Bp , why not try alcohol instead of water ?
Why not mill for a day or so, it will improve the quality a lot.

Anyway good job :)

[D.L.]

wow that is very fast burning bp I hope to make it also one day.

[Brakkie]

That's some very well made blackpowder! I hope to get myself a ballmill soon ( ) and see if I could match that. For a 2 hour mill-time you've done very very well!

Could you tell a bit more about how much media you've used, how much blackpowder you milled in one time and the volume of your jar?

[miech]

That looks like some nice powder, as expected with willow charcoal. I was wondering why you didn't mill it for some longer, the optimum between milling time and performance is around 6 hours of milling (with lead media in a rock tumbler). Anyhow, this is a sufficient quality for lifting and breaking powder.

[Pyrostar]

Hi

I pre-milled the charcoal,the charcoal is reduced from large chunks( 3cm) to airfloat in 20 minutes now, since I
use bigger rollers, the jar does rotate faster now.Then I get the ball mill in my gardenhouse, connect the wires
to the accumulator, and run it for one hour.
The media I use are 1/2" lead balls, 200 balls for my jar.
The jar is filled 1/3 with media, and then I use so much BP-mix to fill the spaces between the
media( as usual, 100g of BP).

Then I add one spray of water from a spraybottle, close the jar and let the ball mill run for
1 hour.
I didn´t try to mill it for 2-3 hours yet, but I will do soon.
And yea, it is very good black powder, and my mill is very efficient,
that also shows that you dont need a very long milling time to get extremely fast BP ( for one hour its
actually a very crazy speed).

And it is good liftpowder, I made a 2" shell which weights 90g, and I used 7g of lift,
I will fire it tonight.
EDIT:

The shell failed, the BP was way to powerfull, the mortar blew up and the shell shattered in thousand pieces.
Maybe I should use less BP next time.
I think I will use the meal powder for rockets or helicopters
So far a waste of my very good silver wave stars I made.

Pyrostar

Edited April 5, 2008 by Pyrostar