How to Make Fast Black Powder

warning i'm not responsible or liable for any damage that may happen to your property animals or people from what is within this tutorial the viewer takes full legal or moral responsibility for everything that he or she does treat black powder with respect before doing anything continuing this video check all of your local statues if you're unsure whether it's illegal or not do not do it use common sense to maintain proper safety procedures all the time stay safe and have fun make the world's first propellant welcome back to the channel pyros it's mythical pyro and in today's video i will be showing you how to make super fast black powder before i start this tutorial i must inform the viewers of this video if you are going to try this at home be very careful and check all of your local laws and restrictions before attempting this and if you are a kid do not do this without parental supervision okay so the chemicals you'll need for black powder are one potassium nitrate two sulfur and three charcoal the ratio of these chemicals to make efficient and fast burning black powder is 75 percent potassium nitrate 15 charcoal and 10 sulfur the biggest factor and the speed of your black powder is the charcoal the charcoal must be of soft wood variety and it must be a wood that grows extremely quick and is very soft now that is only if you want your black powder to be very fast which is what this tutorial is for so i will be using eastern red cedar charcoal that i made from myself out of pet bedding and if you want to see how to make this charcoal i can make another video so now i will show you which methods there are for mixing black powder and the method that i use the first and one of the simplest methods is by mixing the chemicals through a very fine mesh screen such as this 100 mesh screen the only problem with this is that your chemicals have to be verified before doing this and it will never be as fast as using a rock tumbler but if you need to quickly throw together some black powder that is moderately fast this method will work fine but if you're like me and you want to make the fastest and best burning black powder i'm gay you are going to have to use a rock tumbler my rock tumbler is a cheap one i bought from harbor freight and honestly it is very good and has served me well i recommend that if you're going to be making black powder that you buy the same one now for the milling media this is a part of the black powder process that cannot be skimped on you must use lead any other grinding medias that are common and can be bought can spark so do not use anything else besides lead there are a few exceptions to that but i don't recommend them because of their price their availability and also they do have a slightly higher chance of causing impact ignition in the mill compared to lead my mill has approximately a hundred half inch lead balls which is what i recommend for your mill if you have the same size rock tumbler jar as i do now i will be pouring my chemicals into the mill jar there we go all of the chemicals are now in the mill and i will seal it up okay so now i will turn the mill on and i will see you guys back in two hours when the black powder is done milling and i will show you how to granulate it it's been two hours and i'm gonna now open the mill and see how the black powder looks i also will now be putting on my respirator and goggles which you should also do if you're going to do this to protect against inhaling small particles or damaging your eyes okay so you probably aren't able to hear me too well now but i'm going to be opening this up okay so it's now open and i'm first going to take the lid off to get a little bit of black powder off of there okay so now i'm going to sift out the black powder okay so now it is sifted out i'm going to seal my mill up and then take the respirator off okay so now the mill jar is sealed back up and put back on the mill and i have my respirator off if you want to you can still wear a respirator but the biggest concern for when there are many particles in the air is when you initially open the mill now since it's just sitting there it's pretty much fine so you don't have to wear a respirator now i will be showing you how to granulate it okay i'm back and i have it transported into a plastic container and i also have some gloves on you're definitely going to want those and i will now be showing you what to add to this to get it wet for granulation and before we even start granulation you must know to granulate you need a screen this is about an eight mesh screen which is optimal for what i want you could use like a kitchen mesh such as the one i have right here and that will make small granules suitable for other uses but for my uses that right there this screen makes the best granule size okay for the granulation i will be using 91 isopropyl alcohol okay so this step is now where we add the isopropyl alcohol and get the black powder to a consistency that is similar to play-doh or dough so we can rub it across the screen to granulate it this part is hard considering if you add the wrong amount of alcohol it'll become more of a slurry and it will not be possible to granulate and you'll have to wait for it to dry out so what i like to do is separate some of the mild dust into another container before you add the alcohol so that if you mess up and add too much you can add more mil dust and it'll become more of a ball again and that will save you from a long time of waiting for drying i'm now going to add a small amount of alcohol don't go too crazy put a decent bit in you can always add more you can ever take away so you want to just put a decent bit in and you definitely want to wear gloves because you're going to want to mix this by hand okay we are very close to the perfect consistency i think i will not add any more male dust so i will now granulate it okay so i ended up adding a little more alcohol and this ball of black powder is the absolute prime consistency slight glossy texture absolutely perfect so i'm gonna now granulate this across this eight mesh screen the black powder granules are looking pretty good there's a few that stuck together but i can break them up later so i will see you guys when this is dried and we can test how fast it burns and just for fun i will test a little bit right now while it's wet it's probably going to be pretty slow but i actually have heard some people say that a very small amount of moisture helps the burn rate but i don't think it's true we will see what happens okay so we're now out on the sidewalk let's see how fast this little bit burns shouldn't be too quick okay guys so it's about four hours later and that last clip i'll show for real in a second so you can see the burn rate of it when it was completely wet so we'll see how it burns now in comparison to that last clip we will see how fast it is now pretty good probably still a little wet okay so instead of waiting till tomorrow morning to show you guys how this burns when it's completely dry i have a different batch that i use the exact same ingredients exact same method to make that i will show you it's completely dry now and i'll show you a burn test of that now okay so this is one gram of black powder that is fully dried that i made using the exact same process i showed in this video now that is black powder thanks for watching the video guys if you liked it make sure to subscribe and hit the like button to support my channel make sure to leave a comment if you have any questions and i will see you guys in the next video mythicalpyro signing out

Channel: Mythical Pyro

Views: 155,462

Rating: 4.8913813 out of 5

Keywords: Pyrotechnics, Fireworks, Stars, 4th of July, American Fireworks, Mines, Pyro, Shell, Firecracker, Explosions, Explosive, Mythical Pyro, Mythical, black powder, How to make black powder, black powder tutorial

Id: w4Pzwni45Ac

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020