anybody here made their own powder

made black a few times, there is an art to it I failed to acquire.

if you are thinking of smokeless, pay close attention to early efforts and the catastrophic results of instability. read tenny's chemistry of powder and explosives, it is an excellent reference on the matter and may help. IIRC proper washing to remove acid was a difficult problem (cotton fibers are hollow). diphenylamine was a solution.

If you are talking smokeless powder, I very much doubt it. It is not a simple process to make at all, and much less simple to make so that it will burn consistently enough for reliable use.

If you are talking black powder, that is a more "mechanical" process, and CAN be done at home, but it is VERY dangerous to do, so I would not recommend it to anyone. I'm not even certain if it is legal to try to do it.

One of the many problems with making black powder is the safe "grinding" of it to size....that is, breaking the "cake" into relatively easy to sift/sort granules.

Over the past 150 years, many people have been killed in powder mill explosions, and those were folks in professionally designed & built powder factories.

And, even though our forbearers were hardy, do-it-yourself-type folks, few of them even tried to make their own powder.

It wasn't that they didn't know the formulae; they did. But they also liked living and didn't cherish the thought of leaving widows and orphans.

I know most of the folks here are somewhere above the 100 IQ mark, and are reasonably careful workmen. Some are even a bit anal about how careful they are with gun stuff. But, I would never recommend or abet home powder manufacture to members of this group or any other.

As a young lad I once made black powder. It was a real fizzzzle. Literally.Failure dampened my spirits to go any farther. roger

Making smokeless powder requres more chemical knowledge, and chemicals, and processing mechinery than most of us have.

there are erzatz powder recipes available in survival guides, but those recipes are salt-based, worse than black. like corrosive primers but times 500.

the chemistry of smokeless is not actually difficult, but as posted, any sort of uniformity or even control over burn rate would be serendipity, at best.

if you just want to do it for shits and giggles, you need strong sulfuric and nitric acids, cotton, and ether. as I am sure you know, strong nitric acid is not easy to find, and dimethyl ether is scarce too. look for old collodion recipes, for a start.

Many years ago my friends and I used to make black powder, using ground up charcoal bricketts, sulphur, and salt petre. Cant remember the formula we used on this but it did quite well. We had a "cannon" made from a very heavy piece of steel tubing with a steel plug driven in one end and welded in place. A touch hole was drilled about an inch in front of the plug. We loaded about 2 inches of powder (bore diameter 1 7/8"), then a piece of newspaper wadded up, and then a piece of steel gear blank about 2" long. Performance with this was unbelievable using our home made powder. I do remember that the black powder formula we obtained from an encyclopedia did not burn well and we had to modify our formula for a better burn. Lots of fun. Worked well until the pharmacist where we were buying the sulphur and salt petre said, "Can't sell you boys any more of this stuff". Asked him why and he said, "Because I know what you are doing with it". All this was about 50 years ago.

Yep, I used saltpeter and sulphur from the local drug store, but purloined some almost pure powdered charcoal from the school chemistry lab for my black powder "homebrew". I guess my formula had too much sulphur because it left yellow globs in the barrels of both the homemade cannon and my old single-shot 20 gauge.

Sure, dissolve some finely ground cotton linters in strong nitric acid and you have basic smokeless powder, ie. nitrocellulose. I have no idea how you would control its burning characteristics and whether your "raw" powder would act more like Bullseye or H-5010.

Yes : I made it for many years for the Hercules Powder company .

If you are talking black powder, that is a more "mechanical" process, and CAN be done at home, but it is VERY dangerous to do, so I would not recommend it to anyone. I'm not even certain if it is legal to try to do it.

IT'S ILLEGAL to manufacture Explosive devices with out a license PERIOD !.

Why would anyone want to make it ? With all the variations of excellent powders available now days .

Planning a trip by horse and carriage ?.

quote:

Sure, dissolve some finely ground cotton linters in strong nitric acid and you have basic smokeless powder, ie. nitrocellulose. I have no idea how you would control its burning characteristics and whether your "raw" powder would act more like Bullseye or H-5010.

you still need sulfuric acid. it's a dehydration-driven reaction, and that's what the sulfuric is for.

It is one thing to make nitro-cellulose. It is another thing entirely to keep it from combusting spontaneously after it is partially made.

Someone here already suggested that anyone who wants to really know anything about it should read Tenney's book of making powders. He was a professor who taught the chemistry of explosives to chemical engineering students. I don't think it would take much reading of his work to determine that making smokeless powder is a "project" you probably don't really want to try.....

Besides, why would anyone these days want to get their name added to a "terrorism watch list"?

I just drove past the western powder company factory the other day. Maybe on the way back I will stop in and see if they offer a tour.

I have made black powder quite nicely and it worked well. Mind you, I only made small quantities and that was before I fully unserstood the dangers involved. However, regarding explosives mill explosions, one needs to realize just how poor some factories housekeeping and safety standards really are! Being 'professionally' designed and built don't mean a thing! (I've worked in and watched a 'professionally' designed factory being built - it's scary!)