Explosive power of 1 to 5 lbs of blackpowder

.38 Special said:

It may depend at least a bit on how we define "explosion". As I understand it, "low" explosives burn quickly while "high" explosives undergo chemical changes at a speed greater than sound. Gunpowder - both smokeless and black - are of the "low" type, but can behave similarly to the "high" type if adequately contained.

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Correct, gunpowders are labelled "explosive", but in correct terms they deflagrate. They burn. BUT... by the time this was fully understood, the odds of English speaking people switching, and calling the stuff a dee-flag-rant instead of "explosive" was nil.

Black powder when not contained, burns faster than smokeless powder, but is very inefficient, so actually produces lower pressures. But confined can give enough pressure to be a problem. The smokeless powder burns much slower than BP when the smokeless is not compressed, but confine it in a small area like the interior of a rifle cartridge, and you get a different result.

So when you see folks like me doing demonstrations at a historic site, storing their rolled paper musket cartridges in a steel ammo can because the local regs say so, instead of inside a ziplock bag, inside a second ziplock bag, know that this is because the people setting the regs did not understand the behavior of black powder when ignited, and in fact require folks like me to create a bomb, all in the name of "safety". TRUE it is much less likely that a spark would get through the sides of the sealed, ammo can (which is why I don't worry), BUT if something did get through the can and the powder within went up ......


LD

Loyalist Dave said:

Correct, gunpowders are labelled "explosive", but in correct terms they deflagrate. They burn. BUT... by the time this was fully understood, the odds of English speaking people switching, and calling the stuff a dee-flag-rant instead of "explosive" was nil.

Black powder when not contained, burns faster than smokeless powder, but is very inefficient, so actually produces lower pressures. But confined can give enough pressure to be a problem. The smokeless powder burns much slower than BP when the smokeless is not compressed, but confine it in a small area like the interior of a rifle cartridge, and you get a different result.

So when you see folks like me doing demonstrations at a historic site, storing their rolled paper musket cartridges in a steel ammo can because the local regs say so, instead of inside a ziplock bag, inside a second ziplock bag, know that this is because the people setting the regs did not understand the behavior of black powder when ignited, and in fact require folks like me to create a bomb, all in the name of "safety". TRUE it is much less likely that a spark would get through the sides of the sealed, ammo can (which is why I don't worry), BUT if something did get through the can and the powder within went up ......


LD

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Yap, the op's demo may have been even more dramatic if the lid had been in place and taped up nice and tight! ( hold my beer . . . )

And placed inside a drawer, metal suitcase or closed cabinet etc...


People often talk about the lack of explosive force but even with what is shown in the video the burns that "Phoooooff....." can produce (1400 deg C in other words 2552 deg F ?) is nothing minor. If you are close enough skin will melt away you can be blinded too. Anyone too close will be seriously injured. I imagine in a closed room it would be even worse.

I have an "ATF APPROVED" Powder safe that I got from a defunct gunstore whose owner was forced to have made or purchase by the BATFE and local fire officials in order to sell Black Powder in his Ca. gunstore in the 1970s. It is 1" thick of iron and 4' high and 2' deep and 30" wide on iron wheels The door of the safe has about 1/2" air gap all around and is only 3/8" thick ut hung on huge hinges and a huge 7/8" bolt as the locking device . Very primitive and simplistic it obviously designed to vent and buckle incase the allowable 50 pounds went off. I been storing all my smokeless and black and primers on the four different iron shelvesfor years. The huge red "Explosives" painted on the front is somewhat intimidating .

This is all tricky ground.
For one, there's not really an index by which we can measure is this or that is an "explosion." (We mostly define explosions by looking at the debris afterwards.)

Low explosives require containment, confinement, to "work." Black powder was used as a lo explosive for many years, even past the availability of nitroglycerine, for being well known and reasonably predictable. Rather more than a few tunnels, some canals, and stumps beyond number were subject to BP explosions.

Now, Hr.Nobel did change the landscape (pun unavoidable) by combining nitroglycerine with cellulose to create a (reasonably) stable high explosive--if one that was not necessarily "insensitive."

It's interesting that pryroengineering really does not have a uniform explosion scale (other than equivalent weight of TNT), and instead has a broad calculus of things like deflagration rate, sensitivity, and the like.

CapnMac said:

combining nitroglycerine with cellulose

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Well, A. Nobel tried "cellulose" (sawdust) but first generation mass produced dynamite was nitroglycerine absorbed in diatomaceous earth, kieselguhr.

Anecdote alert, Rumor Range:
Some of the local good old boys heard that Bullseye was (then) 40% nitroglycerine, balance nitrocellulose (and small levels of stabilizers.). So they set a can (then 11 oz) on a stump and inserted a blasting cap. Fortunately they backed well off because it went high order and excavated the stump.

Old WW 2 and earlier " blank" smokeless powder is very explosive if contained. In fact before C4 type fillings it was used to fill the old Pineapple type grenades. I of course pulled many a 30-06 military blank and fooled with it. I think it is fine nitro cellose with fully absorbed nitroglycerin and a graphite coating

There is a story/scene in the Churrahee! series of autobiographical/historical books by a member of 101st ABN in WWII about filling Mk II grenades with powder... and misusing the left over powder. One old NCO that retired that year at 30 told me in the early 1970s that when we were using Mark IIs in Europe the ones that produced black bursts where TNT and the Grey bursts were "Gun Powder" could have been hoorah for all I know.

The common "Pipe Bomb" was a common feature of terrorism of one sort or another since the invention of threaded pipe.....

I almost jumped on CapnMac until I read his parenthises , at Demo school everything is related to TNT and we talked about Brisance which related to the speed of the explosion in the material and so the ability to cut verses push.

Like most things in the Service, Demo school teaches mostly how to use things rather than understand them though.

Fullers' Earth was used as a Dynamite base at least as late as WWII, it is also used to make Jewelers rouge and glass polishing compounds, it was also sold to soak up oil spils in car garages, but the vast majority of what is dug out of the ground in North Florida and South Georgia today becomes Kitty Litter. (BTW I keep a bag of straight Fullers' Earth with no perfumes or anything in the shop and barn for spills even today.)

It got its name from being used by folks called Fullers that cleaned clothes as it got pounded into the clothing then shaken out to remove oils from nasty people bodies. The processing plant was long the worlds largest until the South Africans edged them out in the late 1960's and the Russians in the 1970's. Further east the same sorts of soils (about where I75 crosses from Florida to Georgia) are used to extract titanium from and very hard to do. Huge amounts of mud for tiny amounts of titanium. There were persistant rumors when I was a kid that "the government" had attempted to extract radio actives from Fullers earth during WWII...yet I have never seen a bag of kitty liter glowing in the dark.

-kBob

Gordon said:

that I got from a defunct gunstore whose owner was forced to have made or purchase by the BATFE and local fire officials in order to sell Black Powder in his Ca. gunstore in the 1970s.

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You SCORED on getting that thing.
I've read that GOEX is now providing small, black powder "safes" for small gunshops and clubs to help ensure future sales. The max quantity (iirc) is 50 lbs. but it may be a tad less.

LD

Jim Watson said:

Fortunately they backed well off because it went high order and excavated the stump.

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TOUGH CHOICE....,
Do I take a can of Bullseye, and blow-up the stump, or do I use Potassium Nitrate in "stump remover" and some salt and create a location where the deer will congregate to get at the salts ??? BOTH versions have merit!

LD

kBob said:

There were persistant rumors when I was a kid that "the government" had attempted to extract radio actives from Fullers earth during WWII...yet I have never seen a bag of kitty liter glowing in the dark.

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You have never seen a bag of fertilizer glowing in the dark, either, but it was estimated that you could get 10% of the uranium needed out of phosphoric acid with no extra mining.

Jim, that was a joke son, I say , a joke son, Listen to me when I'm talking to you....

-kBob

I know it is a joke, Foghorn Leghorn, just using it to slip in a little bit of trivia from my R&D days.
The slag heaps from our phosphorus furnaces didn't glow, either, but they would make a Geiger counter talk.

And as Heinlein said, tissue does not fluoresce when exposed to radiation, it just dies.

Black powder is used today in some rock blasting. Black blasting powder uses potassium nitrate, it is not graphited. Grain sizes range from 4F to CCC. CCC grains are about 1/2 inch.

https://www.sizes.com/materials/black_blasting_powder.htm

The Rock Of Ages granite quarry in Vermont:

P

Loyalist Dave said:

You SCORED on getting that thing.
I've read that GOEX is now providing small, black powder "safes" for small gunshops and clubs to help ensure future sales. The max quantity (iirc) is 50 lbs. but it may be a tad less.

LD

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Pictures coming, don't laugh at the coverage of decals I put on safes

Gordon said:

P

Pictures coming, don't laugh at the coverage of decals I put on safes

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Jim Watson said:

Well, A. Nobel tried "cellulose" (sawdust) but first generation mass produced dynamite was nitroglycerine absorbed in diatomaceous earth, kieselguhr.

Anecdote alert, Rumor Range:
Some of the local good old boys heard that Bullseye was (then) 40% nitroglycerine, balance nitrocellulose (and small levels of stabilizers.). So they set a can (then 11 oz) on a stump and inserted a blasting cap. Fortunately they backed well off because it went high order and excavated the stump.

Click to expand...

I saw one of those crime shows once and someone had made a pipe bomb with one pound of Bullseye powder and blew someone up in their car. So the cops reproduced the pipe bomb with a pound of BE powder and set it off in a junker car. The force blew the roof off the car and laid it back on the trunk lid. I was impressed and never looked at BE the same way again.

The bomb squad demonstration film I saw used Blue Dot to fill their sample pipe bombs. Pretty destructive.