How to Corn Black Powder

[Music] thank you [Music] hey everybody welcome back to Hoffman reproductions We Appreciate You tuning in today okay to just address the question you're probably wondering if you're a fan of the channel where have I been the last few months nowhere in particular just been extremely busy and have not had much time for videos hoping more time opens up here over the next several months so I can focus more on bringing you guys content that you enjoy so as the name implies today I'm going to show you guys how to make corn black powder now on previous videos I have shown you how to make loose or grain black powder that is how black powder was made clear up until some point in the 18th century and at some point during the 18th century it was discovered that if you corned or pressed your powder to thus make it more dense it became more powerful and durable now I've shot my loose grain powder happily when I first started getting into making my own homemade black powder and had no real trouble with it but as you get more and more into this corn black powder hands down is more powerful you can create black powder that is as powerful or more powerful than the best commercial stuff available and also the grains will be much more durable I found that out that in very very hot humid weather the loose or grain powder can mush together which can cause different problems as far as ignition and can affect your feet per second other various things whereas the corn powder is much more durable the grains of corn black powder you really can't bust apart with your bare hands it'll actually start to hurt your fingertips if you try to so for those two reasons it is superior and I'm going to show you guys how I do it using just a few basic tools you can get fancy with this if you want but I'm going to show you kind of the Poor Man's method okay so what you will need as far as tooling goes is not a whole lot but you will need a mid-size bench vise which I have just off camera here mounted to my workbench you'll need a section of pipe this is a two inch section of steel pipe scrap that I cut in half it's about an inch on the width as I said two inches a hardwood plug that I turned down on my lathe it is gently tapered small here flaring slightly so that does not become stuck that's our plunger if you will and a steel backer plate to mount this in the Vise to press against so one other thing you will need a section of pipe to use as a cheater bar in the Vise that will allow you to give maximum amount of pressure to your powder because we're doing this by hand we need a little help this piece is about three foot long so I've got some Mill powder here so I'll go ahead and get spun around and show you guys how I go about this Next Step okay so we have our Mill powder here mixing spoon our container I'm just gonna use some rubbing alcohol today to get this wet you don't want to get it too wet and you also don't want to get it too dry how wet do you get it um you don't get it that wet you get it too wet it turns to soup and it really won't compress correctly too dry and the finished powder crumbles apart and doesn't hold it so this is just something you kind of have to experiment with but you want to get it to where it really won't form any dust and is will compact just a little bit so I'll just keep adding a little water here until we get it to that point all right I don't know how well you can pick that up on camera but that's about right it's not soaking wet it's also not dry it's right in the middle which is what you want and when you have that done you're ready to load it into your compression die and get set up for the next step okay so I have our backer plate down we're just simply going to put our homemade die down centered on that we're going to take our milk powder here that is wet and go ahead and load it in there I like to put this half to three quarters of the way full there's no set size when doing this obviously this die could be a little larger or smaller this is just the size that I happen to uh half handy and again this kind of powder this was discovered that would make higher quality more powerful durable black powder sometime during the 1700s and by the War of 1812 all commercial gunpowder factories were pretty much doing this because it makes powder that is far superior to the loose or grain power all right that's done I'll show you the next step okay so I pretty much got this thing centered in the vice of my jaws here I haven't begun to compress it yet we have our backer plate our die and our wood plunger I'm going to go ahead and stick my cheater bar on here and go ahead and compress it as hard as I can I'll let it sit for a minute or so and then compress it a little more you'll probably see a little liquid squeeze out of here especially if you got a hair wet that's not going to hurt anything can't really show that on camera but it's pretty self-explanatory how to compress something in a vise so I just do that as hard as I possibly can let it sit for a minute and then crank it a little more before we loosen it up all right so we've finished compressing this and all I do is just flip it upside down hold it off the stand just a little bit or the cookie tray here and just give it a little tap with a hammer out it came there we have our little cake formed a little bit of it might bust off during this process it's really not a big deal what I will do next usually is take and cut it up into quarters fine that helps it dry a little faster and get you on to the next step now when you are doing corn powder and you have wetted it down like this and compressed it it takes a long time to dry longer than the Loose Powder takes to dry because it is so dense so if it's a nice bright warm sunny day where you are stick it out in the sun for the day bring it indoors to a warm dry place or if it's snowing and raining of course a warm dry Place indoors and you want to give it about 24 hours after 24 hours you can begin to cut it all up you can use a knife if you want to do that gently tap with a hammer there's all different kinds of ways to bust this stuff up it will be rock hard you'll be surprised how dense this stuff is but do small batches as we always say the key to safety with black powders do small batches not a massive amount all at once and once you get it all busted up you can go through your sieving or sizing process as we've displayed and shown on our previous videos but you do that you will have genuine corn black powder that will be as good or better than commercial powder and the feet per second that I get currently using my Buckthorn Alder charcoal and then powder ingredients that have been corned I get performance that's in the mid 16 1700 range so that's right up there with Swiss uh if you use of course a a hydraulic press a Pneumatic hydraulic press you could get this stuff just a little more powerful but for my shooting I've been thrilled with it it's very dense and if you're interested in making your own this is the next step or the next upgrade to it so thanks again for watching and we'll see you again next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Hoffman Reproductions

Views: 15,324

Keywords: hoffman reproductions, black powder, corned black, powder, corned black powder

Id: RcFNrnSp0Ew

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022