Testing Carbon black as a carbon source for black powder Sodium Nitrate Black Powder • Sodium Nitrate Black P... Toilet Paper Makes THE BEST Black Powder? • Toilet Paper Makes THE...
I almost commented on an earlier video when you mentioned trying this that you shouldn't bother, but I was curious *how bad* it would be. What people forget about carbon is that diamonds are "pure" carbon, graphite is "pure" carbon, same with graphene, buckeyballs, carbon nanotubes, charcoal, soot... Being pure carbon doesn't tell you anything about its properties because carbon can form an infinite number of molecular configurations. A diamond is a single giant molecule of chained carbon atoms. A lump of charcoal can be made just as pure carbon as a diamond but that doesn't make them the same thing. Lampblack can be made on a spectrum of molecular configurations, but most of the commercial stuff is closer in properties to graphite than to charcoal. I'm certain most of it doesn't even burn in your powder and it would have hardly been flammable at all had it not been for the sulfur.
Couldn't have put it better and I was also going to comment previous to not waste your time, but people usually only believe what they see. Carbon Black, CAS# 1333-86-4 is mainly used for coloring Rubber like tires and making them more durable. Lamp Black has the same CAS#, but its properties are different. So technically they are NOT the same thing as people want to think. Lamp Black is mainly used as a pigment for coloring anything and everything from Concrete to Paper. It would be worse than Carbon Black. Don't bother.
Carbon black was mixed with diesel then sprayed on frozen rivers from helicopters to hasten the spring break-up! This was done in the early fifties in British Columbia on the Kamano power project. Imagine doing that today!
You may not be a chemist, but you certainly are a scientist. Your methodology for your search for the most powerful and most clean burning antique muzzleloader propellant shows this. Thank you for your diligence in your search. All good videos!
Regardless of the cellulose source (like wood or toilet paper) which is heated to produce charcoal for black powder, it is important to carefully control the degree of heat applied during pyrolysis. The buckthorn alder Swiss uses for their superior product is carefully controlled to never exceed 600F during pyrolysis. That is because the result is a mixture of carbon complexed with a variety of hydrocarbon moieties bound to the carbon molecules. Though not scientifically proven as far as I know, these hydrocarbon remnants in charcoal are thought to be reactive catalysts during the burn enabling oxygen provided by the potassium nitrate to more efficiently and quickly react with the charcoal to produce heat. Additionally, since these are hydrocarbons, they burn as well adding to the overall heat generated during the burn. If the temperature during pyrolysis exceeds 600F, a large percentage of the hydrocarbon moieties are driven off reducing this effect and slowing down the burn.
I second. Look at the Japanese and they are sticklers for temperature control during the process. They are masters of making superb charcoal, for cooking anyway.
I think you are a very entertaining person to listen to. The way you tempo yourself and the more casual tone of your presentations make your materials easily digestible, though i have never owned a bp firearm myself.
the Hydrogen in the charcoal gives the blackpowder the powder. They used the brown charcoal (rich on hydrogen compounds) for fast burning hunting powder. The first "modern" battleship gunpowder was the same they used straw and heated it with overheated steam around 170-200C with this methode you enrich the hydrogen it works with normal wood too. It was less abrassive than smokeless powder and it was compressed to an desteny of 2.0
Lamp black is a soot accumulation as you surmise. I heard it sucks too and I think it's the 2@& 3 dimensional multiple forms of carbon that you are exploring. BTW, I just replicated your TP powder (Cottonelle) and it's awesome, it's also the fluffiest charcoal I've ever made, a quart only weighs 2.5g. I think that surface area contributes to a faster chemical conversion to gases and solid byproducts..that translates to increased velocity. Now...think about oxidizers like perchlorate, guanidine nitrate, burning rate catalysts, and consider your flintlock ignites more from deflagration more than a shock wave, 209 primer is awesome. Keep it up brother!
You need 15grams of charcoal to make a hundred gram batch. If a quart of Cottonelle charcoal only weighs 2.5 grams, you would need 6 quarts. Are you sure that weight is correct? Should that be 25 grams, not 2.5?
The problem is the charcoal has the benefit of having a lot of surface area. Light for volume. Carbon black is wanting it to be a dense additive, used as a pigment, you want it heavy for volume with very small particle size. This is the exact opposite of charcoal.
Great job going through the various sources of carbon and confirming (or denying) their suitability for antique muzzleloader propellant. Has anyone suggested using mesquite for a carbon source? Your propellant series is especially interesting, as the firing of a muzzleloader has two primary components - performance and cleanliness. These components seem related - powerful propellant burns more fully, leaving less fouling and is therefore (possibly) easier to clean. It's a fascinating topic, both scientific and historic. Thank you for the effort you put into these videos.
about 3:30 This is a GREAT example of choking up on the rod and "wanging" for new guys. You can very clearly see the rod come to a dead stop when the ball is not seated, and obviously bouncing when it is seated.
Many years ago when I live in England (1989) I use to make my own black powder (mostly for visual effects for American Civil War re-enactment) and I wish you would of done these videos then BECAUSE I and my friends use to go 20 miles to to buy willow wood as the main wood sellers near us didn't sell it and we thought we have to use willow 🙃
I noticed you go by the bounce of your ramrod more than a specific mark or depth for a seating indicator. I learn something every time I watch your videos. Keep them coming.
Well, I had to do that with this because I needed to make sure it was seated and when the ramrod bounces, I know that the ball is seated against the powder
Hemp Crete, Hemp Hurd, for making hempcrete blocks - is sold in 50lbs bags and can be found for $1-2/lb. Or try Hemp Hurd animal bedding for barns, $1/lb. The "hurd" is the dense center of the stalk after removing the fibers. Harvesting requires tungsten steel blades on farm equipment because it's 7x stronger than steel. Check out the old WWII movie, "Hemp for victory." Hempcrete Hurd without the lime binder, might give you more bang for your buck than toilet paper.
Well if your looking for a clean carbon.. I only know this from working at a carbon plant. But water filters use carbon made from coconut shells. It's a very dense very hard carbon. Could be worth a shot.
Love these experiments. 👍. Until you mentioned that carbon black was sourced from petroleum-based products, I was thinking it would be very good. Once I heard "petroleum-based" I was visualizing trouble. In my experience petroleum-based bullet lubes yield a hard and difficult to clean fouling in BP firearms. Natural based lubes only need soap and warm water for cleanup. In my experience, petroleum-based products are "bad news" around BP. And yes, the source of the carbon is the single factor that most affects how good the powder is. Proven by the world's militaries in the early 1800's, and reproven by modern day makers.
I worked in the wine industry almost 50 years and we used activated charcoal (carbon) to decolor and absorb off odors. It was food grade and pure. It made awful BP. My assessment: the impurities in other carbon sources actually benefit the reaction. I also tried using dusting sulfur (used in the vineyard to control pests and disease) and it performed poorly, too. It has an anti-caking additive. My assessment: the impurities inhibit the reaction. My final conclusion: Trail and error trumps science. I enjoy your videos. Thanks.
I will reiterate, yes, it was a bad one, but I think you were due a bad one, as the other recent trials were (serendipitous) and pretty impressive. (You like my new word?) Any-who, these trials are really beneficial for those wanting to make the best antique muzzle loading propellant. And you doing the work cuts out the headaches for the rest of us. Thank you.
Have noticed that velocity is inversely proportional to the number of times you miss your pocket with the power flask.😅😅 Also, obviously, carbon black is made from extracting the fowling from previously used patches.
I've been in the oil and gas business (control design for over 1/2 of it) for about 46 years. When I was a kid we lived in Borger, TX and my dad was a construction superintendent in the Carbon Black plant west of town. As I remember it hey were increasing the size of the bag filters, which increased the recovery of carbon black. "Black" is made by burning gas, oil, or both extra rich. If you've ever lit a cutting torch or rosebud you've seen the soot that is formed if a hydrocarbon is burning rich. The soot is trapped in the bag filters. Once a bank of filters is "full" they switch to a new set, "puff" the set that are dirty (not sure how that was done, I was a teenager and that's how he explained it) to recover the carbon black. FYI- "petroleum product" = hydrocarbon = a molecule of hydrogen and carbon with a ratio of CnH2n+2. For instance, propane = C3H8. That's all it is. It's about as green an energy source as it gets. I think properly combusted wood is likely to have more "things" in it that would make it a better source of carbon than carbon black. Black is too pure. It's literally just carbon. Now back to see what the video results are (bet I can guess).
One thing many people misunderstand about charcoal is that it's not pure carbon. There are impurities in charcoal, mainly hydrogen and oxygen, that change the properties.
I am learning a lot! Thanks for the fun videos as well! I was somewhat deceived by the name of what was used, “lamp black”. In contrast with the toity paper, it seems its a “toss up and give it a shot”, “hit or miss” process with the type of char used. It does make for great videos!! Thanks again!
@@Everythingblackpowder I think you may have laser jet printed the inside of your barrel black. If you type in the "cas number" 1333-86-4 followed by the words; "laser jet" it appears to be laser jet toner minus the silicon dioxide (sand.)
Try making brown powder. If i remember right its black powder but the carbon source is from grass instead of wood. It gets its name from being brown in color instead of black. The stuff was allegedly a stop gap between smokless and black powder in the late 19th century and is way more powerful than regular black powder.
Have you tried plain old activated charcoal? From the aquarium store. As I understand it there is an extra step of injecting steam into the tort to drive off more VOCs, in theory, it should be more reactive. it would be interesting to go full chemistry geek on a batch, there is lots of crud in household chemicals. The stump remover is easy to clean, dissolve the stump remover in water, then evaporate the water. The sulfur on the other hand is basically the same but you have to dissolve it in nearly boiling xylene (basically gas) so not trivial from a safety perspective.
Carbon black is not necessarily from a pure source. It could be from burning garbage. It is made in a similar way as your charcoal but it could be from anything. Plastics... wood... whatever. We had a guy come into the office wanting a building designed for his carbon black facility. He was planning on making it from municipal garbage. They would use the process in tandem with collecting the gas. So you basically are gasifying the garbage at the same time.
Have you tried any catalysts? Fe2O3 (red iron oxide) is a known catalyst for the decomposition of KN. I'd guess +1-2wt% Fe2O3 added to a batch of BP with known charcoal (from TP?) before ballmilling should be good. Love your vids, keep up the good work!
I’m reading the 1937 “complete guide to handloading” by Philip B Sharpe and he has a recipe for a once popular bp of: 75% salt peter, 9% sulfur, 11.5% willow charcoal, and 4.5% charcoal manufactured from carbonized peas. Thought you might find that one interesting.
Very strange result sir, can you make a vid with coconut water filter media please. It's supposed to be pure carbon and should work, I think. Great channel you have made sir and good luck too you. 👌👍
@@Everythingblackpowder Actual professionals don't have bad powder. Many of them actually understand the chemistry involved and also no about other propellants and downright explosives that the gun guys don't study.
Compared to sporting grade powder, it’s bad powder. I’ve talked to plenty of professionals that think what we do is completely unnecessary for firework powder. It’s a simple matter of meeting different goals for different objectives.
@@Everythingblackpowder Agreed, different objectives, but I'm quite sure they already knew "carbon slow & dirty, balsa faster & clean". The point is, there's *alot* of knowledge out there about black powder and pyrotechnics in general. Even if their purposes are different. I've even seen green powder get the job done. That said, your slowest was about 1300-ish of the vids I've seen. Considering that .45-70-405 was a about a 1350 fps loading... and killed a lot of bison, any of them would work. :) Somewhere there's a webpage of a wastewater engineer over in Europe that tested different charcoal time and temps and graphed it out. I'll see if I can find it. You might find it interesting, if but unnecessary refinement. All that said... ways of making nitrate from scratch would be an interesting topic if availability is what's driving this. Or fear of no availability. Would very much like to know of a way to make nitrate from scratch, without purchased materials... that didn't involve urine and feces, LOL!
Thank-you for this, it's told me everything I need to know. I have some carbon black I wasn't certain what to do with it as I didn't know how good/bad it was. I'm now off to make the first stage of BP, which is fiery propellant. It's BP mix not wetted or screened & it's great for pyrotechnics. I'll use the CB I have, thanks again, I'd have hated to waste it.
This is a great series! The sky is the limit (almost) with what you can turn into carbon as I hear it's pretty abundant 😉. Maybe try foods? Cured meats come to mind for some reason. Exotic woods like ebony if that hasn't been done yet. Thanks for your work you've already done. I'm definitely subbing
Lamp black is just nearly pure carbon. We made our own in college lab classes by burning paragon candles. There’s no residual cellulose - won’t be pod for gun powder.
I think using wood fuel pellets or smoking pellets as your carbon source might work well since they are just compressed dry wood shavings and they burn very clean
well as a chemist i can say that in my experience, most sooty left over "carbon" combustion products are not pure carbon but are instead aromatic breakdown products. they tend to accumulate from incomplete combustion since they take even more energy to oxidize and liberate as co2 compared to most other carbon compounds. so i would guess that lamp black is basically concentrated garbage carbon. yeah it probably has really good surface area, but as youve shown over the last few tests, surface area aint everything.
Trying out more oxidizers would be interesting and Wikipedia has a whole list of nitrates, don’t know how many are purchasable but seeing more would be cool
Hello & Thank you for everything you do! I'm a long time collector but just not getting into muzzleloaders and am somewhat obsessive with my hobbies. Have or can you try Birch wood to make the charcoal ? My understanding is that the speed the wood burns at is a huge factor so it might be perfect!
Swiss uses all "alder wood" for there charcoal if you have access to it I bet you could make it identical or even a little better if you experiment with the mixture.
If Graphite is on your list don't bother, it will do about what Lampblack did. I'm surprised that lampblack worked at all. I'm still looking ofr a carbon source that is both easy to get and totally free, which would be either cardboard or the contents of the office paper shredder
One thing I am curious to see is using other (commonly available) things as a fuel, rather than simply charcoal. One specific example is Dextrin. It's used as a binder in fireworks, so at the very least it won't ruin the burn-rate in small quantities, and it should be easy enough to make (Just slow-roast some cornstarch in the oven untill it turns yellow). I've worked out the stochiometry for dextrin instead of charcoal, and it's roughly 2.2 grams (or grains, whichever you prefer) of dextrin for every gram of normal charcoal. The theory here being Dextrin requiring less oxygen (less nitrate) to burn and therefore generating more gas (and with a lower molecular weight). On the flipside, this will almost certinaly burn less hot than charcoal. Instead of just using all dextrin, i though it would be interesting to increase the "dose" in separate batches. Start of with 1/8 of the charcoal substituted and work down to 1/2. Should be easy enough to do, just use regular formula, but replacing some percentage of charcoal with 2,2 times as much Dextrin.
Dextrin is frequently used in the range of 1% as a binder in commercial black powder. My guess is that it would be much slower because it's not as accessible a carbon source as charcoal.
@PwntifexMaximus Yes, but work has to go into breaking the dextrin down into a burnable form, so overall less energy will be released and the reaction will proceed more slowly.
@@vicroc4 BUT! The density will increase. Less energy per gram isn't a problem if it's offset by an increase in density alongside gas production. Not to mention there's still a majority of the charcoal unchanged from regular powder. I wonder if that will make it cleaner or dirtier though... Considerably more hot steam in the smoke.
Lampblack literally is just soot. It’s very dirty because it’s produced by incomplete combustion of fuels, so it has tars/oils like polyaromatic compounds. Try coal coke. It’s carbon with very few impurities. It’s produced by burning off the impurities in coal. So, it will probably work better. I also wonder what anthracite (a high grade coal) would do. Same thing with graphite. Though graphite specifically might not work well because, while it is a pretty pure form of carbon unlike lampblack, it is not amorphous like charcoal. This means the carbons in graphite have a defined crystal structure instead of being in a bunch of random clumps of carbon atoms. In that way it’s very similar to diamonds. So, it ends up being less reactive. It would still be really interesting to try. It’s also really cheap, so why not for the sake of science, and curiosity?
It's less about purity and more about surface area. Charcoal has a very high surface area (why it's used to filter water), graphite does not. Carbon black is basically just graphite, so would expect it to perform similarly.
Ok EBP, l just tested the dry bamboo & green bamboo charcoal . The dry turned out the best & is right in there with toilet paper. You owe it to yourself to give it a try.
I'm also not a chemist. Although I wonder if it might have to to with the oxidized state of the carbon in lamp black. When you make charcoal it's in a low to no oxygen environment, it's more similar to evaporating the impurities off than combustion do to the lack of oxygen.
q.e.d. Charcoal is not carbon. It is a mixture that contains also carbon. A suiss guy (20 years ago) has tested "brown" charcoal, from lower chared wood with good results.
Hi, I think a good wood source for black powder would be dense wood as dog wood is very dense and makes very good powder. Another very dense and hard wood is olive wood and might be a worthwhile try.
IIRC ElementalMaker did a video a while ago where he used ground graphite, which is also effectively pure carbon. He had similar poor results. He also used activated charcoal, and IIRC that was disappointing as well.
I'm wondering why there isn't any stainless steel piezo electric firing antique propellant muzzle loading survival rifle on the market.... great data on the TP powder, I'm going to make some
I wonder if the suspiciously British term "lamp black" refers to the ole timey carbide lamp that British coal miners once used? I say this because in the 1980s some of us soldiers in the Canadian army would go adventure training at government expense. We were outfitted with these small mostly brass carbide lamps for caving expeditions. The burned carbide turned into this black soot from the "little rocks" of carbide. This acetylene(?) gas was created by mixing it with water in a chemical reaction. Maybe this is it ????? That burned up carbide surely resembles your packaged lamp black?
I have a 30-year-old propane BarBQ grill that has about 1/4" of built up black dry I think "carbon" built up in the thick aluminum lid. I was going to suggest it, but that is not really a readily available source for people. Just a thought.
Thank you for all of your hard work and videos. I want to try out your method of using brass media. What brass media are you using? Scrap pieces or are there ball bearings available somewhere? Thank you.
One thing that does not seem to have been addressed in all the excellent experiments you have conducted, and that is how do we get a more wet residue from black powder, I have used black powder left over from the Crimea war, and that left a very damp, and easily removed residue, which I think would give the projectile a much easier passage through the barrel, it would also go some way to reducing the need for a lubricant, and explain why Colt did not recommend lubricants, "modern" black powders tend to leave a very hard residue, so there must be something very different in their make up. Chris B.
I have switched to using only toilet paper as my carbon source 👌 fastest and cleanest powder I have ever made...makes me feel like I have been doing this wrong for years 😂
