RE: Anyone make their own powder?
 

I will agree with everyone that posted against making your own powder. The only reports I have ever read from those that survived making the powder was their product fouled horribly and was so anemic you could throw the bullet as far as that powder shot it. If you think it is not dangerous go to the E.I. DuPont museum on Brandywine creek near Wilmington DE and ask the tour guide how that 5 ton pressing stone got 40 yards away from the pressing shed.

RE: Anyone make their own powder?
 

As Cayugad says, it is plumb foolish to try to made black powder! There may be a few individuals around who are competent to do this, but I sure doubt it.

Even the companies that have been making it for hundreds of years still lose a plant now and then. The fellow who invented Pyrodex was killed when the Pyrodex plant blew up. GOEX lost the factory that was making ClearShot, and true BP is worse!

If you make it is small quantities, you may not be killed when your "factory" blows up, but you cannot expect to be able to make a consistent product that will deliver uniform performance.

I used to make it when I was a kid. You could buy the ingredients at a drugstore-potassium nitrate (saltpeter) and sulphur. Made my own "charcoal". But I didn't know about the "corning" process then. So my powder really was POWDER!

I just mixed up the ingredients, then packed the stuff in the little home-made rockets I had built and lit them with a match. Some flew, some blew up, some just sat there and melted! I was lucky I didn't ever sustain a serious injury. But none of the powder I made was of firearmsquality!

In the early days of the U.S., practically every populated area had its' own powder mill. These were blowing up all the time, and the quality of the powder was totally uncontrolled. Some was usable, some was NOT! The French made the best powder in those days, LaVoissier (SP??) having worked out the formula and methods for the King of France.

The DuPont brothers, upon arriaval in the U.S. tried to use some of our powder, and found it appalling! They started making powder, AND THE ENTIRE DuPont FORTUNE was based upon makling good powder. But even DuPont got out of the powder business not too many years back.

I still have a pound of DuPont FFg........