Saturday, December 19, 2009

Is it illegal to to make homemade black powder for your musket?

If my house was searched and i was making black powder for my musket would i get in trouble? Is there a quantity limit?Is it illegal to to make homemade black powder for your musket?
In most states it is perfectly legal to make black powder for your own legitimate use. There are also some good web sites that give recipes for making it. Since we don't know exactly where your from we can't tell you precisely the laws involved. I'll include one of my favorite websites. It should be informative.Is it illegal to to make homemade black powder for your musket?
I would really not reccomend it either way. Homemade black powder may be more/less powerfull (probably less) than store bought, so you may use an improper charge when you fire resulting in bad accuracy (best case) or your musket exploding (worst case). Also your batch would me much more prone to absorb moisture than commercial powder. As for the legality that depends on your state, but it's probably a bad idea any way you stack it. Go get some pyrodex. It's moisture resistant, much more predictable, and makes less smoke.
Not in most states.
I think that you have to have a license to make explosives.
It is perfectly legal to make black powder but it is not smart to do so. The grinding process for making it can cause it to ignite and you could be seriously injured or killed. Add to this the fact that the powder that you make will be very inferior to the stuff that you buy. Home made powder tends to separate as it is agitated. The heavier components such as the sulfur and the potassium nitrate tend to settle to the bottom while the charcoal ends up on top. The process for homogenizing the powder is beyond what you can do at home. It involves mixing the powder with water to form a paste. the paste is dried, and then ground into powder again. It then must be seived to get the proper granulation. The grinding and seiving is extremely dangerous. The bottom line is go buy the stuff and don't try making it. It isn't worth it. As for a limit, BATF limits you to a maximum of 50 pounds of black powder. I shoot muzzleloaders quite a bit and I never keep more than around 10 pounds of it at any one time. I usually have a pound of ffffG, 2 or 3 pounds of ffG and maybe as much as 3 or 4 pounds of fffG. If you have a hard tome finding any place that carries real black powder, the black powder substitutes work pretty well for caplocks. If you are shooting a flinter, you will just have to find someone who carries real blackpowder because the substitutes don't work well in a flintlock. They are slightly harder to ignite and a flintlock will not ignite it reliably.

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