How old is "Old" powder?

[Sportsdad60]

NOT that I am considering on using this (I certainly wouldn't risk a 137 year old rifle), but how old is "old" when it comes to black powder?

This unopened can came with the .45-70 rifle I purchased over 2 years ago.
I opened it today. :)
Smelled good, no overbearing ammonia smell. Grains are consistent.
Who knows what temps it's been in over the decades.
Good fertilizer I am told. Or keep it, and put it in the SHTF pile of stuff?

[k arga]

black powder will last almost forever , very nice to have to go with the rifle.

[mhb]

is an intimate mechanical mixture of separate, stable ingredients. It is not a chemical compound and does not 'break down' as smokeless powders sometimes do. Heat lower than ignition temperature has little or no effect on BP, though residual moisture may be lost, slightly increasing the speed of burning.
Moisture is the worst enemy of BP, causing the grains to disintegrate and the ingredients to separate. So long as BP is properly stored in the original, moisture-proof containers, it lasts indefinitely.

mhb - Mike

[Sportsdad60]

Lessee if I can remember from chemistry class...salt peter (Pot Nitrate)....charcoal, sulpher, what am I missing?

[Major Tom]

Artillary rounds from the civil war are still exploding after having been buried for 150+ years.

[Dick Hosmer]

That powder (1960s?) is a lot newer than the rifle!

[Sportsdad60]

Hehe, good point Dick!
Okay, I'll go ahead with my first BP loads using my best friend's fathers powder (May he rest in peace)

Hopefully he'll be watching over me when I pull that 12 lbs of trigger on the first shot! :)

[free1954]

did you try pouring a little on the ground and igniting it? or fire it in a muzzle loader with only wadded up paper?

[Sunray]

"...what am I missing..." Spelling. It's spelt sulfur. snicker. Oh and in the Middle Ages, the proportions differed by where it was made. Tended to settle into the ingredients when travelling too. Roads were worse then, than they are now.
BP doesn't have the chemicals in it that create the ammonia smell.

[jon_norstog]

When we were kids we used to shoot old UMC .43 Spanish rounds in our rolling block rifles. That stuff was at least 60 years old and maybe older. If the primers fired, the round would go off with a bang and an evil, blue cloud of mephitic smoke. The duds we would pull the bullets and use the powder for bombs. We were kind of evil, feral children.

jn

[Griff Murphey]

When we were kids we used to shoot old UMC .43 Spanish rounds in our rolling block rifles. That stuff was at least 60 years old and maybe older. If the primers fired, the round would go off with a bang and an evil, blue cloud of mephitic smoke. The duds we would pull the bullets and use the powder for bombs. We were kind of evil, feral children.

jn


For SHAME! Shooting Assault Rolling blocks. In the pre-GCA 68 high school ROTC years we cadets made plenty of home made pyrotechnics....

[jon_norstog]

What can I say? It was fun! And we're still at it, too.

jn

[Dick Hosmer]

The late Paul Parsons (noted cartridge collector from So. CA) had, many years ago, a LARGE supply of Frankford Arsenal Benet inside-primed .45-70s, enough to shoot with impunity. Hey, in those days, no one cared, there was ample to go around. Back to the point - even at 75 years old, he reported that about 90% of it fired perfectly normally.

[PhillipM]

Once in awhile, someone around here will dig up a civil war cannon ball and the EOD from Camp Shelby will take it down there and detonate it. There was one relic collector in Biloxi a few years ago that blew himself up trying to demil civil war ordnance.

[Sportsdad60]

For the record, I 'tested' the old black powder. It's fine!
Sorry for the video editing. It was for fun!
(Smokeless line of powder leading up to a little tissue ball of the old black powder)
Link to 14 second video--> https://vimeo.com/176676475

[AZshooter]

In the late 60's there was an old gent who was at the range every weekend. He always had several flintlock rifles. They looked like new, so I assumed he built them and was firing them prior to delivery to buyers. Ends up they were a collection passed down from his great grandfather. Most of the rifles had filled powder horns of their own, and he once mentioned that he didn't know anything about granulation of powder, just that he filled the horns from gunpowder casks that were handed down from generation to generation along with the gun collection.

He said he wasn't worried about the powder getting old, and speculated that it was easily pre civil war.

[Stephan]

I had some black powder go bad years ago that I had stored in a powder horn. I believe it was Goex 2F powder and the last of my real-deal BP at that time(when the gooberment first made the real stuff hard to get)

Anyhow..despite everybody saying BP stays good forever...my powder must've absorbed some moisture in the powder horn. It was really weak after some time in the horn(maybe a year or so). The powder still looked ok..and would fire...but it was beyond feeble!

I've had various flavors of Pyrodex noticeably lose efficiency when stored in a brass flask. I about always empty my field powder flasks back into the factory container now. I suppose the moral of the story would be to keep your powder dry??

[JB White]

"...what am I missing..." Spelling. It's spelt sulfur. snicker. Oh and in the Middle Ages, the proportions differed by where it was made. Tended to settle into the ingredients when travelling too. Roads were worse then, than they are now.
BP doesn't have the chemicals in it that create the ammonia smell.

Sulfur in American, sulphur in English. If memory serves, it used to be spelled as sulphre. Our current symbol of a lower case f was used prior to denote the old double S in written words.
So, based upon agile memory, did I pass the spelling test?

[IditarodJoe]

BP doesn't have the chemicals in it that create the ammonia smell.
It's possible. Nitrate will reduce to ammonia under certain conditions.

[Dolt]

For the record, I 'tested' the old black powder. It's fine!
Sorry for the video editing. It was for fun!
(Smokeless line of powder leading up to a little tissue ball of the old black powder)
Link to 14 second video--> https://vimeo.com/176676475

Cool video, I liked the creativity of it!

[Dave in NGA]

did you try pouring a little on the ground and igniting it?

Yes, I tried that once. I was a twelve year old kid looking through my uncles garage where I found a rusted thru can of Dupont black powder. My uncle said to put it in the trash but being a kid I thought burning it on the drive way might prove interesting. Nearly a pound of powder was poured out and matches thrown at it with no result. Then I got the bright idea of lighting it from a cigarette. When I pushed the burning ember into that pile of powder it lit off with a flash like a camera flash. After beating out my hair on fire and looking in a mirror I found a good 'sun burn' on my face and hand. With no eyebrows and crisped hair my father knew what happened but never said a work. Some lessons are best learned the hard way.