Testing More Charcoal For Black Powder.

so for those of you that watched my latest video on my powder versus goex versus swiss you might remember me saying something like this those are filthy compared to swiss and even goex after i posted that video i had a subscriber write me and say man that's really dirty what kind of willow if you don't mind me asking are you using i said i'm using this stuff called desert willow it's all over every riverbed or wash around here and he writes me back and he says you know i seem to remember something about desert willow not actually being willow and i thought oh i'll have to look into that now before i even had a chance to look into it literally in a couple of minutes he writes me back and he says yep i just checked desert willow is not a willow a willow is a salix tree or plant and desert willow is however you pronounce that word so i'm a dumb that is not technically willow it's more closely related to a creosote good news is it makes really powerful black powder the bad news is it's really really dirty so i did a little bit more homework and i got a hold of some real actual willow this is pacific willow and it's salix that word and we made some charcoal out of it and funny enough it actually grows right next to the desert willow bush in the particular riverbed that i like to go get my stuff from what an idiot so apologies for the last one that was not true willow my fault my mistake so we're gonna run this test again now we're going to use the real pacific willow we're going to use the eastern red cedar stuff that we've used for a long time and i also have some powder made up with some alder buckthorn charcoal that i got from ben hoffman from hoffman reproduction so ben if you see this thank you very much i really appreciate it and we're going to run some tests with that so all of these powders have been dry milled for 10 hours compressed granulated and graphite coated and just like last time we're going to use the 45 caliber killer southern mountain rifle with a 440 round ball a 20 000 patch and we're using 50 grains of each powder and each shot is primed and charged with the same powder first up is the eastern red cedar adapter right 1611 derrick and that's eastern red cedar red cedar i had a really bad hang fire but i did just get done cleaning it yeah yeah 1669. next up is the pacific willow 1643 these have more of a drop to the 16.50 next is goex 1697. [Music] where next up is swiss a nice solid hit 1787. what was that swiss swiss 1803 wow and last but certainly not least the alder buckthorn okay you shoot the brand 1800 what powder was that 1767 or nice so here's the breakdown with all the powders between the eastern red cedar and the willow and the goex they're all practically the same and even the fouling is about the same i had one wimpy shot with goex at 1607 but i also had one wimpy shot with the cedar at 16 11 and so i i ran it but you look at the averages between those three and they are all right there with goex but the cool thing is over here on the far right if you look at the alder buckthorn compared to swiss you can see that the velocities are practically the same as swiss and even with a tight tighter spread so that's pretty cool because alder buckthorn is what swiss claims they use now again there's always a catch and i don't know how swiss does it but their stuff burns cleaner now i've tried different ratios you know i've tried all different kinds of stuff to get it to burn cleaner and no matter what i do it still doesn't burns clean so here are the patches top left eastern red cedar willow and goex and then on the bottom we have swiss so you can see from the on the top ones there are all about the same i guess if you look really hard and zoom in you might say that willow is a little bit dirtier but i didn't really notice it when i was shooting and swabbing between shots they all look about the same of course the patches on the bottom are swiss and everyone loves swiss for two reasons one it's powerful and two it's very clean now here is the alder buckthorn patches next to the swiss patches and as you can see they're still pretty dirty not nearly as dirty as my wannabe willow powder but certainly not nearly as clean as swiss so what i'm gonna start working on now is some way to get less fouling in my black powder because even though i i'm always experimenting with different ratios and i'm using the same charcoal that swiss uses i still don't know how those guys get it that clean so i got a few things to try we're gonna try refining some charcoal with a couple of different things um which from what i've read can be good or bad so we'll see how it goes so stay tuned for that and in the meantime as usual folks if you thought this video didn't suck do me a favor and hit the like button and consider subscribing and if you did think it suck well then go make your own video

Channel: Everything Black Powder

Views: 11,869

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Id: H7uteTZ8rZY

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022