Making Black Powder with Different Carbon Sources - ElementalMaker

hey what's going on guys welcome back to the elemental maker today we are gonna be exploring how one of the primary components of black powder which is carbon typically you know a good grade of charcoal affects the burn rate of said black powder so I have a couple other carbon sources here we have activated charcoal which has a super super high surface area which is why they use it for absorbing poisons and you know heavy metals out of water and that sort of stuff very very porous material microscopically of course and detoxifies who buzz words and then we have graphite so just taken from a half-inch rod and I'm gonna be making 50 grams of black powder with each constituent here so we'll do 50 grams of willow charcoal now this willow charcoal we actually made in a previous video so if you're curious to see how he made that check that out and graphite just from a half-inch rod and the activated charcoal I just grabbed this on Amazon it's coconut base so probably coconut husk I'd imagine and we'll see how these compare now you would think with the super super high surface area of activated charcoal that it would make for ridiculously good black powder but I've heard that it does not I've never actually tested it myself though so I'm pretty curious to see how this works now of course you can't have black powder without your other two base components now YouTube probably won't let me say it so I'm just gonna call this magical potassium based oxygen who the heck knows what this could be and then we got our sulfur so let's give it a go see how this turns out now obviously we cannot use the graphite in cylinder form so I want to get it reasonably powdered before adding it to the ball mill so I'm just going to throw it in a couple zip locks here old college days style double bagging it but when you're not quite sure how it's going to turn out and I'll give that the schmucky smack you with a hammer ho ho bringing out the bone hammer this was actually from my foray into the medical device industry Wow this graph light stuff well that powdered like [ __ ] this might look kind of wrong man this stuff just is not breaking down too nicely I'm sure it'll break down pretty quickly in the ball mill but I want to give them all a fair shot you know that the charcoal will instantly turn into a fine powder the activated charcoal I think that already yeah that is a powder a very fine powder so I want to give the graphite a fair shot because I'm gonna mill each one for an hour and see how they turn out and I don't want to you know twenty minutes of the milling time to be dedicated to just breaking the grand flight down into a fine powder so what else can we do here maybe a coffee mill a little coffee grinder I think that'll do it [Music] oh wow that didn't work at all holy [ __ ] blasted a hole right through the side son of a [ __ ] that is some angry graphite insane huh look at that shark just blast it oh right out of there oh there goes my good old nitrate grinder that sucks alright so at this point I've been banging away at the graphite for 20 minutes or so and I think I'm just blowing wind up my ass it's not getting anywhere so I'm gonna sift out I need something bigger to sift into you're gonna sift out the bigger chunks get left with the reasonably smaller powder and and we'll we'll just mash that out the amount we need hopefully I have enough there to make a 50 gram batch otherwise I'll have to adjust the ratios bit alright so at this point we have our graphite mostly powdered it's it's not perfect but it's good enough the mill will take care of the rest so we're going to measure out seven point five grams of each charcoal so your your typical black powder ratio seventy-five 1510 we're cutting it in half so it'll be thirty seven point five seven point five and five so let's measure each of these out cuz loosen up alright so there is our graphite measured out and now we'll measure out our charcoal just clean the spoon for good measure keep any in your residual graphite at bay charcoal is gonna occupy a lot more volume because it's a lot less dense than the graphite all right pretty much on the money so there's our below charcoal now would be the activated charcoal I think there's a seal on here of course it's sealed everyone's terrified cyanide will be putting their [ __ ] wow this stuff is dark it looks like looks like carbon black lampblack so this seems to be a little bit more dense than the charcoal all right I then pretty astounding though to see that difference in volume I mean just goes to show you densities and whatnot look at the amount that's in the graphite Cup versus charcoal versus the activated charcoal so you can see the graphite is a massive order order of magnitude more dense than either of these so now I'll just measure out the potassium based oxygen and the sulfur and we'll get each of these in the mill run them for an hour each and see how the resulting black powder is compared so for a small batch like this I'm not going to use one of the homemade all bell jars I'm just gonna use this old Harbor Freight jar they're pretty crappy but they're they're good for small stuff so I got this filled with a bunch of lead lead shot that I poured a long time ago and we're gonna start with the charcoal so there's our charcoal solid potassium oxygen and there's our sulfur and we'll get this sucker loaded up and on the ball mill sit up way out in the yard here and I have a remote switch setup basically just the surge protector that I'm gonna use the on/off switch on to turn the mill on and off remotely because you don't want to be by ball mill at any point when it's running despite the fact that you know we're using non sparking media and a very small charge applied powder but even so you got to treat it like it's a live bomb and it really could seriously hurt me kill you so nothing to nothing to poke about with all right so the charcoal bench has been run for exactly an hour plus minus a minute or two looks like some good black powder so you see black powder is actually more of a gray color if anything now between runs I'm gonna clean out the inside of the mill jar and I'm gonna basically blast this with an air gun just to try to get any remaining powder off of the media although it should be pretty clean at this point and we're just going to go with the activated charcoal now agitated and let's load it up and run it for an hour alright so at this point we get all three powders each one ran for one hour in the ball mill with the same amount of media and same rotation rotational speed rpm obviously so now it's time to test them they they all look pretty similar the activated charcoal is a hair darker than the other two but I'm curious to see how they all stack up so let's set up a little burn test and see if we can't get some maybe I'll be able to check the frames and see exactly how long each batch burns maybe six inches or something I don't know but we'll figure it out so I got my burn plate set up here and what we'll do is test a little little line of each of them feel like feel a bit like Scarface right now alright so we're at about five and a half inches need to add a little bit more now this isn't a perfectly scientific test but it should give us a good idea of how quick each black powder is so I'll actually leave the ruler here just so maybe in the frames I don't know how quick the cameras but hopefully I'll be able to catch a couple frames and get an idea of burn rate alrighty so I've got any potential combustibles well out of the way and I'm probably gonna smoke out the workshop pretty good here alright so got the Flint burning and we'll test the willow charcoal safety glasses on Wow alright I definitely lost a good bit of knuckle hair there but uh holy [ __ ] was that fast yeah damn so on a scale from clap to her that was definitely a pretty quick case of the her flaring up alright got the burn plate cleaned off and we're now going to test the activated charcoal we used to frequent the pyrotechnic forms quite a bit when I was kind of big into rocketry and pyrotechnics and they always said activated charcoal despite its huge surface area made for crappy black powder so I'm very curious to see if that is in fact true and let's see what the burn rate looks like keep my knuckle hair better distance away from it alright so activated charcoal in three two one definitely slower than the willow for sure still a pretty impressive black powder especially for only being milled for one hour but definitely not on the same level as the willow charcoal now to test the one I'm really curious about the graphite so graphite is super pure form of carbon allotrope of carbon and I think that particular graphite is around 99.95% pure and I'm not sure what the remaining you know point O five very miniscule amount of impurity is maybe some kind of binder for extruding a graph Rotter however does they make this I tried to look up how they actually make graphite rossignol that comes up as fishing poles you know graphite rod fishing poles then something about the simple green mixing with like the black powder residue smells like the most putrid ass you've ever experienced in your life stanky and now for the hopeful finale the graphite alright I'll call that six inches and move that out of the way let's see how this does alright graphite in three two one the hello you're supposed to react I might need a torch it definitely seems a lot less reactive oh it burns like [ __ ] unreal I can't believe there's that level of difference I knew it wouldn't be as fast but to see how how utterly terrible this burns and it looks like it's a very incomplete combustion - I mean you can see there's huge chunks of slag left over which is probably potassium nitrate that wasn't consumed unreal so on a scale from hope to clap that was definitely the clap just a slow-burning annoyance that you can luckily fix with the proper prophylactic very interesting alright guys well I hope you enjoyed I'm not sure if there was too much to learn there but I thought it was pretty cool to be able to compare the burn rates of different carbon sources and you know it was definitely visible at least by I that the homemade willow charcoal was by far the fastest activated charcoal not too bad I was actually impressed it's definitely a viable source if you're making rocket engines or something that'll work totally fine and then grandfa light is just a total crapshoot I've also heard that you know tar coal briquettes you know the the fake charcoal that you buy in the stores prest and prepreg nated with lighter fluid that is absolute garbage don't even go anywhere near that you're better off getting the lump hardwood charcoal because that's actually the real stuff but pretty cool I hope you guys enjoyed as always please don't forget to thumbs up subscribe and if you like what we're doing enough on the page I hope you'll consider donating on patreon so I'll keep these videos rolling and I will see you guys next time have a good one

Channel: ElementalMaker

Views: 201,690

Rating: 4.9212351 out of 5

Keywords: making black powder, graphite, nitrate, sulfur, sulphur, black powder, charcoal, willow, activated

Id: uOHdc83ULzA

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018