Making Corned Black Powder

so i've gotten several requests from people wanting me to do a more in-depth video on how i make corned black powder so here it is this stuff here this is 200 grams and it's been milling for about 10 hours and it's ready to go and so this process will start when you are done milling your powder whether you make it with the cia method and then after you let it dry or if you mill it dry like this here this is when this process starts so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of water again this is 200 grams and i know someone's going to ask me well how much water well not a lot in fact it's as little as possible all you really want is for when you stir it around with a spoon it doesn't make any dust i mean for 200 grams it'll probably take like 10 drops of water and yes i prefer to use water over alcohol i find it makes nicer harder granules and it seems like if you wet it just a little bit it has a nicer a cleaner burn than you do if you use alcohol just my experience i can't stress enough how important it is to use as little water as possible [Music] it's really easy to overdo it so i put a few drops in i stir it around still dust coming up which means it needs a little bit more water [Applause] there we go almost there now pretty good just until it stops making dust when you move it around to find is all you really need right there it's really easy to use too much water so here's our pucking dye i get a lot of questions about this too you can buy them but a friend of mine made this one for me so if you really want to get scientific you should weigh out each amount that way you get an equal amount of compression and so on and so forth typically i do about one big heaping spoonful right in there goes right on the top kind of center it a little bit this is a 20-ton press i get a lot of questions about that too what kind of press do i need so on and so forth so the way i do this is i press it all the way down until it stops and then i just leave it here for a little while like you know count to 20 or something like that and then after i count to 10 or 20 or whatever number that i can count to i come back up here and i just give it a little bit more squeeze to make sure it's as compressed as i can physically make it and then count to 10 or something close to it little bit of water yeah and people get upset about this you know they'll see a little bit of moisture coming out on the bottom and it's like well you're using too much water you're you're losing potassium nitrate yeah trust me it's fine so long as it's not squirting out of there like goo it's it's fine you might lose a couple of milligrams at the very most i think it would probably be an immeasurable amount for the most part yeah i would agree you have a little bit of moisture there but that's okay and now you got to get that out of there so typically you just take that you're always going to get a little bit of this along the edges and stuff put that right on back in there nothing wrong with it at all and there you have a puck we'll do another one just for sport again one heaping spoonful [Music] stuff off of there [Music] good wait a minute put that right back in there no need to waste it something that i failed to mention there was i like to let these pucks sit and dry for at least a week and i will set them right out in the sun and just leave them there now i don't know about for most people's climates in the rest of the country but out here in the southwest for the most part it's pretty dry and warm most of the time so a week usually does just fine typically take them like this you could do them one at a time or whatever i'll put a rag on top and give them a couple of hits break them into more manageable pieces then we put them right into our handy dandy grain grinder now i'm sure i'm going to get a lecture from somebody about this saying how it could make a spark and spontaneously combust and you know unravel the time space continuum and you know all kinds of other bad [ __ ] so if you're gonna use this method be careful how do you be careful i don't know don't keep your hand on it don't have [ __ ] three pounds worth of powder underneath it small batches we do one one puck at a time so even if something were to happen it wouldn't be the end of the world nobody would lose any fingers or eyebrows or mustache hairs put your pieces in there like that crank it slowly like so this here is adjustable and we got it set to where we like it where we get mostly 3x and look at that [Applause] so there you have it now you'll get different sizes and so the next thing you do is to take a screen and sort it all by size okay so i get a lot of questions too about what screens it pretty much depends on what it is that you like i have a whole variety of screens this here is like big medium and small or one f two f and three f and then i use a paint strainer and i'll put the finish through all the strain powder in there and i'll move it around and you'll get all the dust off of it to work pretty well so we're going to do here now this is only one puck okay so typically you have a lot more so there you have one f now you could run that back through the grinder if you wanted it all smaller than that typically we make one two and three f then run it through this now i have had some people ask me uh how much yield do you get you know how much loss do you get uh by doing it this way and we've done the math and it works out to be about anywhere from 15 to 20 percent and i'll show you what i mean by that right here what you'll get is dust you have some fine grains in there too and you could uh you could run those through a finer strainer if you wanted to but we're trying to keep them all uniform so what you'll get thank you there's a particular amount of dust which is pretty much uh unusable and it's not really that big of a deal because you could just put it right back into your deal and form it into pucks and be done so it's not the end of the world but you see you can knock that out right there and of course you know wear a mask and safety goggles and all the safety stuff when you're doing this so you're not breathing in this stuff which will make you cough and does taste and smell bad then you'll get what is about 3f and then again you know the dust and just put back in the jar and then compress it again so it's not like it goes bad people do talk like oh well there's always a particular amount of loss well it's not like you lose it loosely you know so there you know those right there a little bit bigger you know you could put them in there and again you could run them through the machine again too and you know try and get a little bit more uniform you know right there's 2f this here is closer to 1. but we have our set up to where we get mostly 3m you'll get less dust if you have bigger granules the the tighter the granules or the the type of the machine is the smaller your granules are the more dust you'll get so there next what we do we take a little bit of graphite powder this is something i'm not really sold on yet uh it is something we're doing but you know mostly just because that's what we hear the commercial outfits do so we take our powder here that's already sorted and we'll put it in our tumbler here with no media none just the just the corned powder with a particular amount of graphite powder it's like a half a gram per 100 which is not a lot and we'll turn it for a few hours uh again with no media and then the finished product ends up looking like this now this has been tumbled this has been graphite coded this is 3f which looks awful a lot like goex this here is 2f and the 1f stuff which is right here i don't bother tumbling or graphite coating that stuff you know it's pretty pretty good sized granules i just don't bother with it it's not something that i use typically besides for you know fourth of july activities so that's the finished powder in fact let me put some my powder there and get some 3f go x that looks uh remarkably similar and performs very well it outperforms go x yeah and shoots in and kick and a lot of those other ones and like some people talk about elephant powder some old powder that was made by an outfit called elephant so anyway that's that i hope that was helpful look i'm going to taint my stuff by putting that goex right in there don't don't do it don't all right for the love of god don't know what we'll do we just light it on fire burning my finger now all right so here's some of our homemade 3f this has not been tumbled polished or graphite coated plenty fast very fast all right so i hope that was helpful to somebody out there um if you have any more questions or comments uh by all means go ahead and let me know i'll do my best to answer them let's see if i can think of a few off the top of my head uh the ratio of black powder i i still for the most part use 75 15 10. i'm always playing around with it generally you know i'll all up it i i well okay let me be 100 honest i've been running more uh potassium nitrate lately than i have in the past i'll run probably 77 13 10. i find that works pretty well it just seems like it kind of leans the ratio out and makes it burn a little faster and a little hotter so you know that's that charcoal that's another thing i get asked a lot about uh typically i've been using eastern red cedar since i pretty much started but over the last few months i've switched to willow and i've been really happy with the results um you know it's easy to buy the the wood chips and just throw them in the than the thing and make charcoal and i started you know going down to the riverbed and getting some some willow branches and making charcoal like that and it really does make damn fine black powder i know i've been kind of critical of the uh everybody knows you have to have you know willow for the best charcoal uh but it really does make uh really good black powder uh so uh that's what i'm using nowadays and i'm probably gonna stick with that for some time uh i i get people telling me all the time you know you need to try this kind of wood for charcoal you try that kind of wood and some stuff man i've never even heard of this stuff um but willow works really well really really good if you can't get a hold of that you know buy the eastern red cedar you know chips or whatever at the pet store or whatever that that works well too um let's see what else up in the ratio seems to help a little bit um the the graphite thing uh you know tumbling tumble in the powder uh it does help mostly what i think it does is it knocks the uh the sharp edges off of those granules and as far as it burning better i don't think so same thing with the graphite you know i keep saying i'm not really sold on it well because i haven't noticed a difference it doesn't make it any faster it doesn't make it any more powerful it doesn't make it any cleaner as far as i can tell with every test that i've run i i can't tell the difference so uh i think that's about it so um again if anyone's got any questions go ahead and ask me leave me a comment uh if you thought this video didn't suck do me a favor and hit the like button and maybe consider subscribing and if you did think it sucked well then go make your own damn video

Channel: Everything Black Powder

Views: 426,921

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Id: D24DR5OLtds

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022