Powder ID?

Jim Watson
Handloader magazine has a column "Propellant Profiles" with granule dimensions.

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I looked. There are two pages on VV powder and nothing I can find about VV grain dimensions.

O k I thought and gave you a good answer. Now what did you do with it?

Gloob you know how to ask our help but you seem to need to learn how to respond with your choice. How old are you? Too young to know better or too old to remember the question, or your choice of actions.

The saga continues.....

Really a darn shame as the OP has what amounts to about $200 in powder and there seems no definite way to know exactly what it is aside from educated guesses. The powder still had the factory seal with no label and removing the label from an 8 lb jug of VihtaVuori powder is not an easy task. No clue why it was removed?

Pretty much up to the OP where he wants to go from here but if there is no way to really ID the powder it becomes about $200 worth of fertilizer unfortunately.

Ron

I was wondering what j1 was talking about myself.

What are you going to do with it that's so imaginative? Sprinkle it on your brownies?

Awesome! Video please.

Hey you could test and see if the jug is really "break away" like all the manuals say.

Potatohead said:

Awesome! Video please.

Hey you could test and see if the jug is really "break away" like all the manuals say.

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I think mods will promptly delete any such videos. And I doubt he's talking about setting off an entire jug at once with the powder still in the jug.

I was kidding. I certainly hope he doesnt try and blow the jug up. You never know these days though, with all the You Tubers out there.

Potatohead said:

Awesome! Video please.

Hey you could test and see if the jug is really "break away" like all the manuals say.

Click to expand...

Actually it is rather boring. Light an 8 lb jug of smokeless powder and all it will do is sit there and burn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icsbtkYpfBw

Black powder is another story. When I had my shop and the subject would come up I did what we see in the video. The white puff of smoke is always amusing too.

So while powder can be used as fertilizer (works real well) and it can be burned unless smokeless powder is inside a case it is rather boring.

Ron

"You're suggesting he charge a case with 89 grains of unknown powder? Would you be willing to pull the trigger on the first round?"

Sure - I would! But I'll want to hunker down behind that big rock over there and pull the trigger with 10 yards of twine. Reminds me of when I was a kid, my dad used to blow tree stumps with dynamite. Sometimes he'd let me push the handle on the detonator.

Those were less heavily regulated times, needless to say.

Reloadron said:

Actually it is rather boring. Light an 8 lb jug of smokeless powder and all it will do is sit there and burn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icsbtkYpfBw

Black powder is another story. When I had my shop and the subject would come up I did what we see in the video. The white puff of smoke is always amusing too.

So while powder can be used as fertilizer (works real well) and it can be burned unless smokeless powder is inside a case it is rather boring.

Ron

Click to expand...

Interesting

Thread drift here but the original idea has been beaten into a coma, if not completely expired.

Black powder is very sensitive to pressure. I used to burn time fuse (little green cord, yellow markings, with a black core, det cord is green, yellow markings, but has a white core. The difference is REAL important!) for a training exercise. At the end we would often have to dispose of several feet of the stuff by burning it. It could take too long to wait for it to go from one end to the other (cuttin' into chow time ya' know) so we'd coil it up and step on it. The increased pressure would make it go "pop" and the section under your foot would burn in an instant.

The artillery guys burn excess powder after a shoot. The rounds come packaged with a max charge of powder and the firing solution might call for less than max. The excess powder is removed (it is in a series of bagged charges. The round may come with 7 bags and the firing solution might require 5 so you pull two out.) and disposed of at the end of the shoot. The excess powder is aligned with the wind and the powder is set on fire from the downwind end so the flame front has to burn against the wind keeping the amount burning at any one time a safe amount. If you started from the upwind side you could get much bigger flames than you were anticipating.

Dan

Fire! Fire! Fire!

(in the voice of Beavis and Butthead)

Here is a thought... Just throwing it out there. Do you have any Lee scoops availible? The bigger the better!! Scoop the powder level and Weigh the powder in the scoop. Do this serveral times and get a good tight average for the powder weight. Now. Compute the VMD(cc of the scoop/wght of powder in grains) of the powder and compare to Lee's list of VMD's for VV powders....

Probably not enoght variation in VMD's but ya never know...

Good Luck!