Is DIY Smokeless powder possible?

[Prokhor Zakharov]

Again, I completely agree with DL, and against anyone that says it's useless, with someone of reasonable intelligence, and enough time, effort, and money, with the knowledge of chemistry, literally nearly anything is literally possible. DL is completely right about the most well known methods, they are meant for high-yield industrial environments, for a single person, they are a waste of time since the equipment needed is impossible to source. But, a single person doesn't need a high-yield approach. If a single person was working with a formula and process that netted 50% product, all with equipment and feedstock that won't end with one on a list somewhere, that is a major win. It's doesn't matter if 50% of it is crap, you can always purify, and if you need more, run the reaction again, or if you need much more, scale the formula and if you know what you are doing you should be able to ensure that your yield remains the same by controlling the various variables, up to a certain point, where your equipment no longer meets your needs. There is also a certain element of creativity when it comes to figuring out a way to source what you need when its not readily accessible. There is a long and storied history of chemists going to some rather outlandish lengths to obtain the reagents they needed to perform an experiment, and this even applies to names that are still spoken in some of America's greater institutions of higher learning.

The linchpin of the situation is just how good of a chemist you really are, I'd say 30% is effort, 30% is understanding, another 20% is the ability to persevere when you get nothing but shit when you should have had a good outcome, and the last 20% is god-given talent. The last 20% is what separates the great chemists from the award winning chemists. I am one of those people who lacks that entire 20%. My efforts in chemistry are through sheer sweat, blood, and tears, with absolutely no talent for laboratory chemistry whatsoever.

 

[Doctor Love]

Again, I completely agree with DL

When did I start getting initialised like HHH?

The last 20% is what separates the great chemists from the award winning chemists. I am one of those people who lacks that entire 20%.

Well the difference is, honestly, OP has shown part of that already - I actually want him to succeed, since he's already set his sights on something more advanced and worked his way up to the natural bottleneck. I can see why he got pissed off with the other dude - he seems very motivated, and getting told you can't do something for some vague reasoning is, well, pretty nasty.

My efforts in chemistry are through sheer sweat, blood, and tears, with absolutely no talent for laboratory chemistry whatsoever.

Honestly, that's how it should be. The big barrier imo is to build your own tools - and that's how it used to be. In the early days, students were expected to build their own glassware using a blow-lamp. Nowadays, we "buy" premade glassware but the entire point of glass was that it could be blown into shape and was inert and transparent. Likewise for terracotta and porcelain, they're traditional because they could be made as-needed by an individual.

Someone who can forge their own tools is self-building, while laboratory work is just "work" - if you can make it self-sustaining and keep that "inertia" you can become a real master in a way that schooling doesn't.

If a single person was working with a formula and process that netted 50% product, all with equipment and feedstock that won't end with one on a list somewhere, that is a major win.

Oh I'm probably on a list because I did that and then told everyone about it. I used urea as the initial feedstock, since it eventually decomposes into nitrate - then I just whacked it in a bottle and stirred it with a dremel brush to make it warm and frothy as fuck. It worked, so long as you keep the oxygen going, the bacterial action will inevitably turn it into nitrate. Surprisingly the equilibrium didn't seem to matter - the pH seemed to balance itself out really well. I was expecting to intervene, but the action continued - the pH didn't kill off anything and it just chugged along. My only concern is that there may be too much nitrite, but honestly, it seems like there isn't.

Literally any yield is good. I didn't really measure it, but there's enough mass in there that the yield is way above the "profitable" line for the USA.

Market price for smokeless is $90-180/kg and if you go this route, you can get that much for $40 even with a 10% yield. AdBlue is 33% Urea, so it's £4 per kilo and the cotton/glycerol would be similar. Some rough guesses, but you'd still be above market rates if you got as low as 15% overall conversion via biosynthesis.

I live in the UK. It's pretty much impossible to get nitric acid here. I figured that since the guys who made that rule kept going to "Paedophile Island" with Jeffery Epstein, it was worthwhile to counter it out of spite.

 

[gobble gobble squawk]

I live in the UK. It's pretty much impossible to get nitric acid here. I figured that since the guys who made that rule kept going to "Paedophile Island" with Jeffery Epstein, it was worthwhile to counter it out of spite.

If the people telling you that you can't/shouldn't/shouldn't be able to do something and routinely involve themselves in policy making and the legislative process to prevent you from doing so are ALSO the people raping children on an industrial scale, starting wars in your name and forcing you to live with the survivors of those wars (whilst also telling them it is your fault and you, your parents and your kids are on the menu, gratis). I'd say disobedience is a mitzvah.

 

[quaawaa]

You guys are retards, JStark included instructions on how to make both gunpowder and primer at home in your kitchen using ping pong balls, nitrile gloves, and car batteries.

 

[wumbawumba308]

Excellent post, quaawaa. Another recommendation is the Improvised Munitions Handbook by the US Military (libgen), as it is the Anarchist cookbook that is designed to not blow off your fingers (as easily).
As for practical suggestions, professional scientific glassblowing is an art form that is difficult to master, but good is not the enemy of perfect here. The ability to create your own glassware and customize is incredibly useful for chemistry in general, not just for this particular application. Approximately $20K (a lathe, torch, etc) is enough to get started if you want to DIY. There are cheaper options such as hand torches, but again, this is an art. Luckily the consumables like gas and glass (borosilicate) are cheap. A good book is "Building Scientific Apparatus" (ISBN: 0-201-05532-5 also on libgen).

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

To ensure the purity of what you are working with, I'd probably repeat the entire process with the powder obtained at the end of the first run to ensure all impurities are removed. At the end of the second run I'd probably resuspend the solution in water at least twice more to ensure the removal of any remaining solvents. Then I would indeed use vacuum filtration, dissolve some reagent grade camphor in pure ethanol, and resuspend the powder in the camphor/ethanol solution, then let it dry without vacuum filtration. This will ensure that you are working with pure NC and pure camphor as a stabilizer.

The only hitch in the changes I am suggesting is that at several points you would be dealing with unstabilized NC, before resuspending it in the camphor solution. If one is careful it shouldn't be a problem, however, if one is not sure of how good their chemistry skills are, then I'd stuck with the original method, your purity will be lower, but less chance for error.

 

[quaawaa]

Another recommendation is the Improvised Munitions Handbook by the US Military (libgen), as it is the Anarchist cookbook that is designed to not blow off your fingers (as easily).

Attached.

Also attached is the homemade tungsten bullet guide.

 

[Heather Mason 2]

As others have said you can probably make smokeless powder completely on your own if you really need to. You'll be spending lots of time and money trying to get an acceptable product, not to mention the possible risk to your health. Nitric and sulfuric acids are very volatile and very corrosive, you need a properly rated and installed fume hood or you need to do your nitrations outside. Nitro compounds are very unstable until you stabilize them, you risk some nasty explosions especially once you start sizing up your batches. You will not have the batch to batch consistency that an industrial supplier has, some will be underpowered and some will be overpowered. Is it worth investing that much into making an inferior version of a product you can buy at Walmart and start stockpiling right now, and seems to last indefinitely according to gun boomers?

When properly stored, an unopened container of smokeless powder has an indefinite shelf life, but once it is opened, the stabilizers it contains begin to slowly but surely weaken. Even then it can still last for a very long time.​

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During the 1960s, a hunting pal and I pooled our resources and bought a 60-pound keg of H4831 from Bruce Hodgdon. We loaded it in everything from the .220 Swift to the .300 H&H Magnum, and while velocity with the Swift was not as high as it would have been with a quicker-burning powder, accuracy was great, and at 60 cents per pound who cared about a few additional fps in bullet speed?​

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I still have a couple pounds of that powder, and best as I can tell it is as good as it was when I bought it more than 40 years ago. Hodgdon had purchased the powder on the military-surplus market, so one can only guess how long ago it was actually made.​

Powder in loaded ammunition can also have a very long life. I am told that some of the .50 BMG used in Desert Storm had been in storage since the 1940s.​

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Commercially loaded ammo can have an equally long life. Until a few years back, the tables of a dealer who attended a local gun show were always piled high with beautiful vintage boxes of ammunition, some of which went back to the late 1800s. Most of it was for collectors, but he often priced cartridges in slightly damaged packaging much lower.​

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I bought a box of .22 Hi-Power ammunition loaded by Savage during the 1920s, and not only did every round fire in my Savage 99, it was quite accurate to boot. That ammo was probably close to 80 years old when I shot it.​

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https://www.rifleshootermag.com/editorial/how-to-determine-gunpowder-shelf-life/83922#replay​

Black powder is significantly easier to make, it's just sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate. If you want to think about firearms in a SHTF situation where society almost completely ceases to exist for decades I'd think about black powder firearms over conventional ones.

View attachment 6159033

Not all table tennis balls are made from nitrocellulose anymore, you'll have to make sure you know what you're getting using this method.

"It was the key aim when the so-called plastic ball was introduced on 1st July 2014 after several years of research and development: the ITTF wanted to move on from celluloid and now it has become a reality. The last supplier of celluloid balls has withdrawn approval, and by end of 2020, the last of these balls will disappear from the list." https://www.ittf.com/2020/01/28/transition-celluloid-plastic-balls/​

 

[Trichuriasis]

Keep in mind that for anything more sophisticated than crude pipe bombs, details start to really matter. From returns of your nitration and purity to granulation and stabilizers (iirc black powder is less finicky because the size of your particles affects the combustion process less), and these parameters WILL vary batch to batch because you're doing crack shack chemistry.
If you want to load your shit into cartridges you will need a lot of trial and error and fine-tuning, and probably a few sacrificial guns as well. A hardy manual action 12ga might withstand some pissing hot loads but anything more delicate runs a risk of sending the bolt through your skull. Really, just hoard gunpowder, they sell cans of it for reloading. Or go for scooping out black powder from fireworks.

 

[Troon_Patrol]

There was an old book called "kitchen sink reloading", IIRC and it talked about reloading with poor substitutes for real moderm components like smokeless powder and reforming primers and such. Worth a read. Keep in mind black power is filthy running it a gas gun even if you get the math?PSI right your going to get 20 rounds before it's so fouled it needs cleaning. Loading it it intos bolt gun or pump action I see no issues as long as yo clean a lot.

 

[wumbawumba308]

Here's an updated version of the "Homemade Primer Course." It goes into the synthesis of new green primers, and it has more citations.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

View attachment 6159033

In the event that ping pong balls change their material choice I used to make nitrolacquer from guncotton dissolved in the solvent. Gun cotton is just nitrated cotton which is easy to do and is still on the market as magic stuff flash cotton or flash paper, same stuff. I believe there is a very old video on YouTube of someone doing the process to a pair of jeans.

 

[wumbawumba308]

The updated primer course referenced the wrong patent for the Federal Catalyst formula. Though, it looks like Federal did report on the "Catalyst" formula, but the one on their website isn't quite it. Here's a patent that describes a similar recipe to the one in primer course. All in all, the prep looks legit enough. Bismuth is cool.

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Fletch and use a bow or crossbow before EVER trying home nitrate propellant shit Jesus Christ dude.

 

[Adolf Hulkler]

Fletch and use a bow or crossbow before EVER trying home nitrate propellant shit Jesus Christ dude.

"pls dont consider making a stable propellant pls be very afraid!"

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Nitrating to make propellants is extremely hard because if you aren't extremely careful it will explode instead of conflagrate and grenade the action into your face, on top of the fact that you're going to be working with nitric acid at all, never mind to try to make propellants without accidentally making explosives.

You need stabilizers, you need to make sure you don't get voids or acid spots or water spots, unless you want nitrocellulose and NOx and self-heating until it blows up. You can't really do burn or bomb tests on your propellant assuming you had the chemical engineering chops to get there, and this depends on chemicals you have to get, not make.

In a SHTF situation, how are you going to have access to all of that!? Compound bows/crossbows are no joke, and don't depend on chemical supply lines that won't exist. BP muzzle loaders aren't a joke. The likes of a CVA electra, a flintlock of some sort, or traded percussion caps (or cartridges assuming stocks or factories exist) are infinitely more likely than someone playing basement chemist.

If this is just "fuck the man", you do you. I know I can't talk people out of shit here of all places. I do know I can at least suggest people not fuck with some extremely dangerous shit.

 

[StyxHexenHamster1350]

>CTRL-F
>"Birkeland Eyde"
>0 results.


Do you have access to air, water, and electricity?
If you answered yes, you can probably make nitric acid using the Birkeland Eyde process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland–Eyde_process
It gets even easier when you realize that ozone generators and fishtank bubbler pumps can be purchased on Amazon.

An even easier propellant is Ammonpulver. What is it? Just ammonium nitrate and charcoal.
Most instant-cold packs contain a small amount of ammonium nitrate. Charcoal is everywhere.
The ammonium nitrate is typically in prill (ball) form, it needs to be crushed into a fine powder first.

For primers, there's always mercury fulminate. Mercury is dissolved in nitric acid, and then mixed with ethanol.
Really really corrosive primers can be made with Armstrong's mix: Potassium chlorate and red phosphorus (ie, match head powder mixed with match striking strip powder)

And almost all the REALLY FUN stuff is also made with nitric acid:

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Just gonna point out that Sig just Sauered all over Jacksonville and while Skeletor isn't wrong he's also lacking skin on his face for a reason and you should just learn to handle high draw weights.

 

[Internet-Based Lobotomy]

Just gonna point out that Sig just Sauered all over Jacksonville and while Skeletor isn't wrong he's also lacking skin on his face for a reason and you should just learn to handle high draw weights.

It's good to exercise caution and let people know that things like this are dangerous but you're trying awfully hard to convince people not to bother with smokeless gunpowder when it has been made for just under a century and a half. Just to put it this way: this is the "Is DIY Smokeless Powder Possible?" thread and not the "Post SHTF Hunting Ideas" thread. You should suggest people learn how to make snares next time since you won't have to worry about the limbs snapping on your crossbow and possibly putting out an eye.

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Nigger did you just join two days ago to whine about telling home chemists to not make nitrated propellants?