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It seems you can find nearly anything on Pinterest these days.
Including how to make gunpowder the old fasion way.
But this isn't necessarily an idea that's new
The recipe for gunpowder has existed in encyclopedias ever since there were encyclopedias.
But today we're putting it to the test.
Now, I've been meaning to try this experiment ever since I started creating YouTube videos
and it's taken until now to finally get around to it.
Now you may remember in a previous video
I took paint cans and broken-up pieces of stirstick,
and put them all together and threw them in a fire to make homemade charcoal.
Charcoal has a lot of different uses but the reason I made that batch
was for this experiment today.
Now, the three main ingredients we need for making our old fashion black powder are
potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.
My go to for potassium nitrate is this brand of stump remover which is 100%.
And I found a ready supply of sulfur by going down to a local gardening store and picking up a couple of different varieties.
Of course charcoal you can make yourself:
it's the black stuff left over in the ashes of your fire
and it's pretty much a big chunk of carbon.
In my experiment making charcoal I tried using paint stir sticks I also tried sticks and twigs I found on the ground and a bag of sawdust.
They all look a little bit different and come from different sources but at this point they're essentially made of the same stuff.
Now charcoal is basically elemental carbon
and it's number 6 on the periodic table of elements.
And sulfur is number 16.
The sulfur itself should be a relatively pure element but it comes in different sizes and shapes as well.
None of these materials burn very quickly by themselves
but if you mix them together in the right ratios the results can be explosive.
So now that we have gathered up all of our individual ingredients, the first step in making our black powder is to crush them all into a very fine powder
but it's very important that we do this in separate containers because we don't want those powders to mix together yet.
So lets go ahead and get busy crushing this stuff up.
Charcoal dust.
Beautiful.
This is looking good.
I'm getting exited.
So update guys, I've just all three of my powders finely floured
and this is how I did it.
I took individual containers and a blender and I blended it into a fine powder
and then used a strainer to gently sift out only the finest particles.
Now in the case you don't have a blender
you could always use something like a mortar and pestle.
This is basically a bowl with a stick that crushes up all the powder.
In either case it's a good idea to use a very fine strainer to filter out only the smallest particles.
Now comes the fun part: we get to mix it all together.
Now I'm going to be using the traditional ratios that trace back thousands of years to when the Chinese first discovered this and used it in their fireworks.
It's a very simple ratio of 75% potassium nitrate,
15% charcoal and 10% sulfur by weight.
Now potassium nitrate by nature is hydroscopic;
it pulls moisture out of the air, and that is not good for gunpowder.
So before we mix these powders together I'm just going to bake this in the oven for about 25 minutes.
Ok, so our potassium nitrate has been in the oven for 25 minutes
let's get it out and let it cool down and mix these three powders together.
Now to keep things nice and easy
I just mixed up a 100-gram batch.
I used 10 grams of sulfur,
15 grams of charcoal
and 75 grams of potassium nitrate.
Now that we've got these powders in contact
its important to be very, very careful and do this in a fire safe area.
It's good to have a fire extinguisher nearby or even better, to be outdoors in the open air.
When we mix this we don't want to use metal because it's conductive we want to use something like wood or plastic
the idea being that we just want to prevent any static electricity from being discharged into the mix.
Our white powder has just become black.
Black powder.
It's extremely light and fluffy.
It's very surprising, probably because of the charcoal.
I wonder if I can blow bubbles in it.
Not very well.
Now to make sure this gets mixed up a little more thoroughly I'm going to pour it back and forth between two cups.
Give it a shake, give it a stir, and just do my best to make sure these three materials are intimately combined.
Keep away from sources of ignition.
Boom!
And it goes off.
So there we go.
I've been shaking and stirring this as intimately as I could get it for the last 2 minutes.
Hopefully, by now it's thoroughly constituted.
So let's pull out a small spoonful, light a match and see if we can touch it off.
Alright, weighing our composition. The verdict is
98.5 so we lost about a gram and a half in the process.
But that's okay because we've still got a lot
in fact 100 grams that's probably too much.
Right here guys is our homemade black powder.
Looking good, looking good.
Beautiful.
So just realized I measured out a heaping tablespoon
of powder which is WAY too much,
because if this works when it goes off it's gonna make a huge cloud of black smoke.
But that's something I'm totally willing to do for you.
It's time to light it off, guys
and I'm a little bit nervous because this actually is quite a bit of black powder
but let's do it!
Here we go!
Nice, nice burn! And that put off quite a bit of smoke that's what I would expect
black powder to look like I would say that was a success so that worked and it
pretty much worked the way I was hoping it would it looked like kind of a slow
burn but that's only because it's in the open air we crammed this into something
like a firecracker it would go off with a bang. Look at the residue here you just
see a little bit of ash but it looks like everything has burned completely
looks like our composition was just about perfect
[I'm] very pleased. One more thing I want to try really quick is make a small line of
this powder to make an improvised fuse
Beautiful. Alright test number two. I've laid out a nine inch strip of powder to
act as an improvised fuse so we can test the burn rate. Here we go.
Sweet! So nice very consistent, slow, and steady burn that's exactly what I see
now this burns relatively slowly because it's in the open air if it were in a
confined container the burn rate would increase exponentially and probably make
the container explode. So guys our black powder works it looks great it burns
really well so let's do a quick summary of how we got to this point. We start off
with three different materials -- potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur.
We ground those materials into a fine powder than used a strainer to sift off the finest
materials and mix them together in a ratio of 75 percent, 15 percent, and 10
percent respectively. We used a plastic straw to stir them
together then taped two cups together to shake it for about two minutes, which
resulted in this fine dark gray composition we call black powder and
black powder doesn't necessarily have to mean gun powder, there are far more uses for
it than that. It could be used for making fuses
rockets and fireworks and in the early days it was used as a blasting agent for
mining materials out of rock so in an end-of-the-world type situation you
could theoretically use this stuff to play Minecraft in real life but it's a
very dangerous substance and it is regulated by the ATF which means it may
not be legal for you to manufacture or possess but don't worry because you can
just run down a local sporting goods store and pull something similar right
off the shelf. Hey, thanks for joining me for this video guys we now know how to
make black powder. I'll be looking for you the next video talk to you then.
Now that we have this stuff for our next video we should try making firecrackers
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