Danger. Home made…

In reply to 03Panther :

Beryllium. Funnily enough, there's beryllium mines not far from me. Even a town named for it. Beryl, UT. Expensive stuff though. 

Maybe a manual coffee grinder... stainless, small volumes, cheap, adjustable. Or bezos has stainless manual wheat grinders for $45, table mount ftw. 
 

*edit. Apparently brass coffee grinders are a thing. But it looks like the working bits are stainless? I don't drink coffee so I have no experience. 

This was my first test, after attempting to granulate with 90% isopropyl and no binder:

Second test, after pressing and granulating by hand to roughly ffg, but not completely dry:

After a week to dry, I went out for a test in the stick. 
This is my .50 caliber Traditions Kentucky flintlock rifle. Using .490 projectiles and a .018 patch:

The powder isn't fully dry yet. I gave it a week, but we've had rain nearly every day so the humidity is quite high. Still, it works well. I tested it twice in the pan only just to make sure I had ignition before seating a shot. 
 

Compared to goex, it seems slow and dirty. There was noticable fouling after only 6 shots. This may be because the powder isn't fully dry, or maybe I didn't measure my inflgredients well enough. I have a better scale now. But I'll try it again in a couple weeks and see if there is any improvement. 

As for corning, that seems to speed up the burn rate significantly. I picked up a cheap pepper mill for testing and it made the granulating process much faster. I'll be buying a larger mill made from wood and brass with ceramic bits going forward. But for now I'll call this a success. I easily have enough product for 3-4 more outings so I'm not in a rush to mix more until the weather cools off. 

And I broke my shiny new pepper mill. Crushing the last couple pucks, just doing my thing, and oh what's that in the screen? Looks like a chunk of ceramic. 
Cheap mill is cheap. 

Second batch mixed. I mixed wet this time with distilled water. I used too much, which is fine but makes a good mess. And it slowed down the process of sifting out the tumbling media to the point where I decided to let it dry with the marbles still in there. The little tumbler is just the right size for 2 bags of marbles and 8oz of powder. I put in 8tsp of water. I'll half that next time.
 

I still have a bit from my first batch. Now I'm getting a better handle on the process I want to  mix up a pound or so to have on hand since the weather is cooling off. And I've been watching a few YT channels dealing with the process. I think I'd like a better scale, and maybe to try altering the mix a bit. One guy was getting better results with a 77/13/10 mix vs the standard 75/15/10. I may try that. I've got about 30 shots on this mix and it seems to work just fine even if the ignition is a bit slower than commercial powder. Speaking of commercial powder, the stuff is still just as hard to come by, and is roughly $50/lb. So the savings are getting even better. 

For drying, maybe order desiccants and store it in an airtight box?

In reply to Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) :

I'm going to be pressing most of the water out when I press this into pucks, then letting it air dry for probably a couple weeks. I've thought about desiccants, and even have some on hand, so I may try it, but my experience shows that after pressing and granulating, a week is plenty of time to air dry the stuff. 

For all that I live in the wide open country, I really don't get out that often these days. Maybe once a month on average. So I'm not in a big rush. 

We learn. If you're not learning, you're doing something wrong, and even that should be a learning experience. 
 

I used up my first batch some time ago. A fair portion of it was just testing and not actually in the rifle, but still. All used up. Second batch was done slightly differently. Most notably, I mixed the stuff with water. Too much water. Getting the marbles out was a chore of scraping the black putty from each marble and losing a lot in the process. I let it dry, pressed and granulated it, and put it in my kit thinking it was fine. I got one shot off before I realized it was just too slow and it fouled the works beyond use. This is caused I think, by the marbles, and made worse by the water. What I believe is happening is simply not enough time milling. The instructions say to use lead media, but $$$ and lead dust caused me to use marbles. They work, but they weigh less. I did not take this into account. The recipe says mill for 10-12 hours w/ lead. I think I need to go longer with the lighter media. I'll test that. Then, the water just made that issue worse because mud is harder to tumble than powder.
 

So I have nearly a pound of unusable powder. Maybe. I think I may just chuck it back into the mill and see if I can buy any improvement. I'd hate to let it go to waste if it just needs more time mixing...

Back to the first batch. It worked, but was noticeably slower than Goex. I'm not confident the HF scale I was using was any good. And the marbles mean it likely needed more time milling. We learn. The other thing I did was press that batch rather wet. I'm not a chemist, but some reading leads me to believe the excess water that was pressed out was pulling some of the potassium nitrate out. That's the oxidizer, and not enough would lead to a dirtier burn. Running rich, as it were. The water that pressed out definitely has something in it, as it left a light brown waxy residue. We learn. 
 

Brings me to the third batch. I have a much better scale now. So I measured my stuff, milled it for 20 hours, and noticed the bottom of the tumbler had 1/2" of powder that had hardened into a false bottom. I didn't think anything of it, and scraped it out before adding  just enough water to keep the dust down while pressing, and here we are. I lit one of the pucks whole just to see. It went up pretty good, for all it couldn't have been 100% dry. That was last week. Today I processed 8 pucks into roughly ffg. I haven't burned it yet. I'm confident in my measurements, but less confident that the powder is properly mixed. If it isn't noticeably better than my first batch, I'll put it all back in the mill for another 12. 
I also need to get a finer screen so that I can use something like ffffg for priming. But it worked as ffg on the first batch.. hopefully I can get out to the range next weekend. 

For your lead milling balls, use these. I used 1 oz weights and used a hammer to close the ends and make them a little more round. The tumbler will take care of the rest of it. You can pick up 10 of these for $8 on Amazon. IIRC I used about a pound of weight in my tumbler. 

If you are using water, you only want to use enough to make a crumbly, damp mixture. Just damp enough that the chemicals will stick together. The point is to press the three chemicals together intimately and be just damp enough for them to stick and to keep static electricity to a minimum. Then you can corn it through a screen to give you your grain size and dry it in baking sheets. 

I have also had success using alcohol to wet the mixture for mixing and corning. That I would mix the chemicals, squeeze them dry in a filter, and then corn them through the screen. 

Success. Putting the slow and dirty and not at all acceptable second batch back through the mill overnight sped things up considerably. Compressing and granulating speeds it up too. Just took delivery of a bigger grinder so that process should be much improved too. I'm still not convinced the powder is sufficiently dry, so I'll try to press it into pucks in the next day or two and let those sit for a week in the open. 

The cheapest manual wheat grinder Amazon had is a game changer. 

Now I need to get another screen. The finest one I can find at Walmart catches what is roughly 1.5/2fg. I'd like to also be able to collect as fine as 4f. Google says that's roughly 60 mesh. As it is, a get about 40% yield. Maybe a little less. The rest gets pressed again and reprocessed. It's slow, but it works. The new grinder cut my granulating time by about 3/4. Fantastic. Pressing takes way longer, but I don't see any way to speed that process. I do notice the pucks seem to be crispier/tougher the longer they sit. There's some chemistry there I want to learn more about. 

Apparently one can find 60-mesh stainless 6" strainers under the guise of a flour sifter. Amazon delivered mine yesterday. Very comparable to the pyrodex fffg I have on the shelf, so there's my tip of the day. 
 

In related news, the more thoroughly tumbled powder is really good. Went out today and the finer stuff goes through my priming tool very well, and aside from two sparkless strikes, it's fast and crisp. Easily half the hang time from my first batch. We were shooting steel at about 50y. Noticeably less drop going from 50gr to 70, so I'll have to bench test it and find the best charge. And the best part was how much less fouling I had today with the better mix than previously. No pictures because we were having too much fun with the smoke stick and then skeet.
Did see a movie set out in the desert though. Complete with a big area full of catering trucks and the like. some kind of western: