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March 6th, 2012 at 11:23 am
Whoa, major Captain Kirk flashback!
March 6th, 2012 at 11:30 am
Ahh yes, The Gorn.
March 6th, 2012 at 11:42 am
Seems to burn a little slow…..I should do some up and try it in my cap and ball gunz.
March 6th, 2012 at 11:46 am
I don’t know much about reloading, but I’d be interested in seeing if smokeless powder could be substituted for this (at a certain ratio I’d assume, it does seem to burn more slowly). No doubt it’s not ideal, but it could make a decent alternative if it turns out to be usable.
March 6th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Um, no. That’s the same sort of junk I made as a kid using KN03 stolen from the school science lab, and it’s fairly worthless. Real gun powder, in this case real black powder, doesn’t go fizzle, pause, fizzle, blech, fizzle, etc. It goes “poof”. Put that crap in a gun and all it’ll do is make a mess. If you want to know how to make real gunpowder that really works in real guns, go to the muzzleloading forums.
And no– “substituting” smokeless even with commercial black powder just may get the bullet out the end of the barrel, but the energy difference is huge. 30 grains of the proper smokeless in the 30-30 cartridge delivers around 2K fps with a 170 grain bullet from a rifle barel, whereas the same case filled completely with black powder is effectively a common pistol round, say about half the velocity. With good home-made black powder, figure somewhat less.
Some cartridges still with us were originally designed for black powder. Say, a .38 Special or a .45 Colt, filled with black powder, will do quite well (though you’ll probably wish you hadn’t done it unless you know about cleanihng a black powder gun). When loaded with smokeless, those cases contain mostly air. The miniscule amount of smokeless powder takes up a small amount of the case’s volume. Larger “magnum” cases will shoot fine with black, for a few shots until they foul on all the resulting gunk, but you’ll get vastly lower energies.
Shooting with black powder is a whooole different ball of wax. If you want to learn about that, again, go visit the black powder and muzzleloading forums.
March 7th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Or just hang around Cemetery. Who I believe actually finally air black powder out of an AR-15 last year, and regularly shoots BP or of 1911s.