Measuring Black Powder Weight vs Volume

hi i'm mike bellevue and today we're over on my progressive reloading bench and later on i'm going to be loading up some 45 colt black powder ammunition but before i do that i wanted to address an issue that i noticed off of last week's video and in last week's video you may recall that one of the things i showed you how to do was to find out how much powder black powder should go uh in your cartridge case right and we had marked a dowel filled it without her and get that lined up and we know when we do it up the line that's how much powder we need and then we threw it on the scale which i'm going to do right here and that was 27.7 grains or 28 grains all right so here we are powders in the pan and 27.7 grains of powder so i said 28 grains and i got several comments asking me how many grains of volume by volume is that because black powder is loaded by volume and that is true up to a point but i think i think most i shouldn't say most people a lot of people don't really understand what that means and a lot of people seem to think that there is a measure of weight called grains and there's also a measure of volume right like using one of these measures that's also grains right kind of like ounces can be weight or ounces can be volume of liquid uh but that's not true for grains grain is strictly a measure of weight there are seven 000 grains in a pound and that's it so what people get confused by is all gunpowder not just black powder but all gunpowder is measured by weight that's why we have scales but it's dispensed by volume and that's true whether it's black powder or smokeless powder it really doesn't matter and let me try to show you i don't know if this will come across very well on all right this is an rcbs uniflow powder measure and it's used for smokeless powder right so you put powder in the hopper up here not gonna do that and right in here inside this drum there's a charging cylinder and the size of that cylinder is adjustable by these nuts you can make it bigger or smaller and to throw a charge of powder right the charging drum fills up from the hopper and then you rotate it and it dumps out of here into a cartridge case right boom and that's how smokeless powder measures typically work well what you do then is you would throw this charge of say unique or you know whatever blue dot on a scale and you'll adjust this until you are throwing the correct weight of powder charge for the cartridge that you're loading so if i was loading 45 colt with unique right i would adjust this until i was throwing 7.8 grains of unique when i dump it on the scale so i'm measuring it by weight that's i'm determining i've got the right charge but i'm dispensing it by volume the volume inside that cylinder okay so that's true for smokeless is true for black powder it's the same thing so let's let's say let's say i'm using a powder measure like this one right we all know these powder measures look at where you can see it all right so we're all familiar with these powder measures a little set screw it's got a slider and it's marked in 10 grain increments all right so if i want 30 grains i would set it right here and that gives me 30 grains well that is exactly the same thing right the space inside here that i'm going to fill with powder is the volume that weighs out to 30 grains of powder okay and i'll show you okay so i've got the powder measure right and it's marked it's filled up to 30 grains and i'm going to pour it on the scale and we've got 29.4 grains okay now these measures necessarily are not going to be precise and the reason for that is because they don't know when they make these if you're going to be using 3f 2f 1f if it's going to be goex swiss vano elephant so they're approximate most of them are gauged i have found for 2fg goex right so they're they're pretty much right on for that now this is 2fg schutzen 29.5 and it's set for 30. right that's how it works so your powder charge is measured it's determined basically by weight right so we're going to be using a 29.5 or 30 grain powder charge but it's dispensed generally by volume uh because of course they're expecting you to be loading a muzzleloader not cartridges right but that is true of all powders not just black powder and and i hope that kind of clears up the misconception about grains of volume versus grains of of weight it's all the same there are only grains of weight in fact for volume we use cubic centimeters right so this is a 1.9 cubic centimeter scoop if i was if i was to fill this up it is going to deliver just under 30 grains of powder and 28.7 right so [Applause] so that's the way we measure volume cubic centimeters not grains and then we measure weight by grains so it all comes out the same so basically when you are trying to develop a load or to load cartridges or load a gun you develop your load basically you're going for a weight that determines your powder and if you were doing precision long range shooting where it really mattered and you're a good enough shot that small differences matter to you right your gun is that accurate and you are that accurate a shooter those guys who are really good at that they weigh every charge because that's going to give them the most consistent results because by volume it can vary a little bit depending on how tightly it gets packed in one of these things but weight is always weight so if you weigh out a 30 grain charge every time it's always going to be 30 grains okay so i hope that clears things up a little bit feel free to write me and tell me that you totally disagree with me if you want that's fine or you didn't understand it i'm not trying to obfuscate it i'm hopefully uh just trying to clear up that misconception okay that brings us to the last area i want to discuss in terms of measurement and that is black powder substitutes like triple seven now there's nothing magic about these they will behave exactly the same way as any other powder and we treat them like black powder so once again if you want to find you know the load for your case you do the same stick method right that's the uh that stick is even with the crimp groove on the bullet so we're just gonna fill this up until that stick is at the right level all right so i've filled the shell casing with powder i put in 1.9 cc's with this leaf scoop and now if i put my dowel in i'm going to be right on the line right so we know that that's a load and triple seven by the way does not like compression uh if you compress it much at all you'll start to get kind of erratic velocities the pressure changes quite a bit but i'm going to throw this in the scale okay now we know that when i did the same amount of black powder in this 45 cold case i had about 28 29 grains of powder with triple seven i've got 14.8 okay so we can round that to 15. so the load for this is going to be 15 grains of triple seven by weight and that would be absolutely correct now the funny thing is another funny thing the thing you have to know about substitutes is they develop them to be a volume for volume equivalent to black powder right so if you're determining your case and you weigh it and you get 14.8 15 grains that's your load uh and now you're going to want to know how to throw that load consistently now in this case we know it's 1.9 cc's right so that's okay but let's say you didn't have a lead dipper set and you didn't already know that so you're working with one of these right well this measure is calibrated for actual black powder so like like i showed you before when i set this on 30 fill it up with black powder and throw it on the scale it measures very close to 30 grains but set for 30 on here it's going to be about 15 grains of triple seven and 15 grains of triple seven takes up the same volume roughly as about 25 grains 28 grains of regular black powder right so we would want i pour this in here i've got some space i'm going to push my plunger up there okay so i've raised the plunger up so that that triple seven load just fills the case i put it back on the scale right still 14.8 and now we're running just about 20 grains that's that's the equivalent on this with no compression now we did 30 with regular black powder because i'm compressing it about a tenth of an inch and with triple seven i don't want to compress it triple seven is a little more powerful anyway so my triple seven load for that cartridge is going to be 20 grains volume equivalent right which is 1.9 cc's or 20 grain setting on one of these black powder measures and the reason i did that is because they didn't expect you to be loading cartridges and using a scale they expected you to be loading rifles with a flask or a fixed powder measure and that you'd already been using black powder and now you want to replace your black powder with this stuff right so they want you to be able to replace it using the same measure that you had used before which which makes absolute sense okay so this is a difference if you wanna if you wanna determine it by weight it works just like any other powder because it is just like any other powder but if you already know the black powder load that you want to shoot and you already have a volume measure for that you know whether it's one of these or a piece of deer antler that's carved out or whatever well you can use that same volume measure you're using for black powder just fill it up and dump it in because it's a volume for volume equivalent so like i say triple seven does not really like to be compressed so that's something you should take into account because you probably are compressing go x in your loads if you're using goex right now okay so that cover substitutes and that really covers the difference uh between measuring and dispensing powder and just to recap all powders whether it's black powder smokeless powder it doesn't matter if it's vano powder or goex powder or swiss powder or unique or bullseye or blue dot or imr you name it hp38 doesn't matter they are all measured by weight when you look at a reloading manual it's going to tell you the weight of the charge of powder and you need a scale to get that right but all powders virtually all powders except for real precision applications are actually dispensed by volume and that doesn't matter if it's smokeless powder or black powder that's that's how we do it so once you've got your weight you have to determine what volume you know whether it's one of these or it's a pounder measure mounted on a press uh or a powder measure mounted on your bench or a piece of antler it's hollowed out to hold a charge it doesn't matter you want to know what volume holds that weight of charge and that'll do it consistently and that's what you can use to load so i hope that makes sense i didn't add any voodoo or extra witchcraft to this that wasn't necessary so if you like it give it a thumbs up and we'll see you next week

Channel: duelist1954

Views: 29,773

Keywords: black powder, reloading, powder measure

Id: G_5EEPf0vzE

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022