OctoberSky Posted June 12, 2016 Posted June 12, 2016 Does anyone see a potential problem for ball milling charcoal and sulfur together, to have ready to go?, if I'm always making 5 lbs batches of BP? All I'd have to do is add in the appropriate amount of Kno3? (And ballmill again). Right? Thoughts?
Arthur Posted June 12, 2016 Posted June 12, 2016 WHY? The need for milling is to incorporate the nitrate into the charcoal intimately so what would you achieve? Weighing isn't terribly hard or time consuming. Anyway you have to weigh each ingredient prior to making a batch. Sulphur can be very messy to mill, It's prone to simply stick to itself or the jar sides (and the media!) which means having the batch all weighed out and ready to go lets the sulphur stick to the charcoal and nitrate as well as the mill! 1
Ubehage Posted July 10, 2016 Posted July 10, 2016 (edited) Does anyone see a potential problem for ball milling charcoal and sulfur together, to have ready to go?Yes, I do see a potential problem. And I also fail to see the point of it.If this would actually save you time in the long run - which I doubt it will - then I'd probably mill the KNO3 and Sulfur, and leave out the Coal. Sulfur will burn, and so will Coal. Obviously Coal and Sulfur ballmilled will burn even faster and easier than any of them alone.But, KNO3 and Sulfur does not burn. Nobody knows why, as far as I know. Edited July 10, 2016 by Ubehage
Mumbles Posted July 10, 2016 Posted July 10, 2016 Thermodynamically, it should be able to burn with sulfur. I've never actually tried however, so I'm not sure if it's true that KNO3 + S doesn't burn. It may just not have a lot of driving force given that a lot of the products may be solids. If you want to go this route, there is no issue with pre-milling the charcoal and sulfur together. Another common method is to mill 75:5 nitrate:charcoal together, and mix it with the appropriate amount of 10:10 charcoal:sulfur. The charcoal in the nitrate helps to prevent it from clumping or caking, while maintaining a non-flammable mixture. The two parts can actually be screen mixed and yield an acceptable to good product depending on charcoal source. Milling together will generally yield a faster result however. Pre-milling is really best suited to screened mixtures, or if you don't have regular access to a safe space to mill live materials. If you pre-mill everything, you can make good BP in probably an hour or less live milling, as opposed to a few hours at least with coarse materials. As an aside I also don't necessarily believe the KNO3/sulfur into the charcoal pores thing whether it's from milling action, or from dissolving and precipitating upon drying. It's more of an old wives tale in my opinion. The pores of charcoal are on average around 10 microns in size. After milling the charcoal particles are in this same size regime, lacking features and more or less spherical. The cell structure is mostly destroyed during milling. 1
pyronoob Posted August 1, 2016 Posted August 1, 2016 i just put all my components in the mill at the same time. That way i know the weight is right and everything gets mixed....i have the HF ball mill and can get really fast bp milling 200grs for 2 hours. 1
Sparx88 Posted August 1, 2016 Posted August 1, 2016 It's that hard to just measure everything each batch. Avoid diffulties.
Seymour Posted August 6, 2016 Posted August 6, 2016 Potassium nitrate with an excess of sulfur certainly burns. There was a time that I would mix the two 50/50, dig a hole on the side of a hill on a still day, place a kilo or so of this at the bottom, and bury it loosely with earth to stop the sulfur vapour from being hot enough to ignite on contact with air. The vapour produced a fair amount of heavy "smoke" from the condensed sulfur (as well as the nasty Sulphur dioxide) which flowed down hill and would stay low to the ground the whole time. I remember it being quite hard to ignite, and very slow burning, so even if it can burn in the 75/10 ratio, it is unlikely to be able to explode with much violence, or at all. 1
patsroom Posted August 6, 2016 Posted August 6, 2016 Does anyone see a potential problem for ball milling charcoal and sulfur together, to have ready to go?, if I'm always making 5 lbs batches of BP? All I'd have to do is add in the appropriate amount of Kno3? (And ballmill again). Right? Thoughts?If you just want it ready to go, then just pre-measure the components and bag each one in its own bag or even all of the components in the same bag with the weight written on them. That way you could store them until you needed to ball mill the batch.....................Pat 1
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