making smokeless powder

Has anyone had any experience in making their own powder?

Why would you want to? I use Norma powder made by Bofors. I think they know a bit more than me about making powder. This thread is about as dumb as the one about turning match bullets into hunting bullets.
 
I believe that it's quite common in the North West Frontier area of Pakistan. I think they use old film.

From what I've read, they don't make smokeless powder out of it - just grind it up and no doubt throw a few 'additives' in like used tea leaves, fag ends, or something. With that and primer compound made from old-fashioned (old-fashioned as in dangerous and banned in the west generations ago) ground-up match heads, I doubt if they worry much about MVs and even less about MV ES values.

Making nitrocellulose powders is a VERY dangerous process even in proper laboratory conditions. It involves nitrating pure cellulose (cleaned up cotton, treated wood pulp and suchlike) with concentrated sulphuric and nitric acids. This is a highly exothermic process (ie it gives off a LOT of heat) and if the mix is allowed to get above a certain temperature, then clear the area fast before the fire / explosion occurs and concentrated acids are flung about.

If you don't kill yourself up to this point and see stage 1 through, you have guncotton - a high explosive. It has to have its molecular structure changed to become a propellant which burns as opposed to an explosive which detonates. This was the difficult step in the 19th century, guncotton invented decades earlier and a lot of people killing or maiming themselves trying to make a viable gunpowder out of it until Veille, Nobel and a few others came along.

By dissolving the guncotton in a solvent such as acetone producing a 'colloidal' toffee like plastic material, it can be rolled and formed into the various shapes used in smokeless powders (originally rolled flat and cut into little squares) and when it is dried out and the solvents drawn off for reuse the resulting material is what you want as your basic propellant, needing various additives and coatings to control burning rate, reduce flash, run easily without generating dangerous static electricity
etc, etc.

Alfred Nobel then discovered that nitroglycerin, an unstable explosive like guncotton, but liquid and even more dangerous if anything, could be used as the solvent and both it and the guncotton were combined in a changed safe form that incorporated a higher energy quotient than the earlier method. This is where the term 'double-based' comes from as two explosives are combined in the production process as base materials. (Viht N500 series powders and Reload Swiss RS40, RS60, RS70 etc plus nearly all Alliant Reloder (Bofors) powders contain nitroglycerin, but aren't true double-based forms as they are made as single-based nitrocellulose powder kernels and at a late stage in the process undergo a partial infusion process that sees a bit of nitroglycerin soaking in.
 
Why? The OP is merely asking a question . . . . .

Yes, a dumb question. Its been said there is no such thing as a stupid question. This thread proves there are stupid questions. That just my opinion for what its worth.
 
find a school chem book and start from there :popcorn:! for me it comes in a 1kg tub of Experience and all my fingers and eye lids are intact bright light comes to mind :eek: mind you we used to make guncotton at school :norty:
 
can i suggest the obvious that without a considerable investment in commercial gear, insurances, licenses and at least one chemical engineer your effort would probably see the removal of several body parts or a notable custodial sentence...
 
find a school chem book and start from there :popcorn:! for me it comes in a 1kg tub of Experience and all my fingers and eye lids are intact bright light comes to mind :eek: mind you we used to make guncotton at school :norty:

Ah! Those were the days! Making guncotton and "accidentally" igniting piles of powdered magnesium.....after we had floated a cannon ball in a tub of mercury and chased the splashes around the cracks in the bench!

Nitrogen tri-iodide was also fun to make!

Once mixed saltpetre, sulphur and carbon on my back of my chemistry exercise book........All was fine until I lit it! :stir:
 
Ah! Those were the days! Making guncotton and "accidentally" igniting piles of powdered magnesium.....after we had floated a cannon ball in a tub of mercury and chased the splashes around the cracks in the bench!

Nitrogen tri-iodide was also fun to make!

Once mixed saltpetre, sulphur and carbon on my back of my chemistry exercise book........All was fine until I lit it! :stir:
Mine ignited without warning!:eek:
 
haha haa Thought we were the only school with a mad lab tech ??who would give out the book of joy !as we called !, we had a lad who made a big batch of fulminate mercury ? as we use to make very small amounts and place it under our shoes or drop bomb in rice paper to make it crack off :confused: , well he was told to dissolve it in the fume cab ? but he just binned it in the waist bin next to it ,the next day a cleaner dropped something heavy on it and BANG Flash she was blown out the room and the lab was trashed all this while us little cherubs were singing our harts off in morning assembly , morning has broken had a new meaning that day :rofl: funny we were not allowed to make it after that :-|
 
Speaking of gun cotton...a year or two before I got there, the story went that some lads from my college dried out some damp guncotton in one of the college airing cupboards before packing it in a CO2 cylinder from behind the bar and blowing up the Kennedy Memorial on the edge of the college grounds on Runnymede.

How does anybody survive youth and childhood?

Alan
 
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