The combustion products of smokeless powder are primarily gaseous. Black powder, by comparison, leaves around 55% solid residue — mostly potassium carbonate, potassium sulfate, and potassium sulfide — a hygroscopic mess that fouled actions, corroded barrels, and had to be cleaned out after every range session or the gun started rusting from the inside.

Anyone who's shot a black powder cartridge rifle knows this isn't abstract chemistry — you can feel the fouling building up in the action by the third or fourth shot. Modern shooters complain about carbon buildup in an AR after a few hundred rounds. Black powder shooters were dealing with a corrosive paste after every cylinder or every magazine.

Abel and Dewar studied Nobel's patent carefully, noted that it specified nitrocellulose "of the well known soluble kind," and quietly developed a modification using insoluble nitrocellulose (guncotton) with vaseline instead of camphor as a stabilizer and a higher proportion of nitroglycerine. They took out a patent in secret before informing Nobel.

Nobel supplied them samples and production details as a professional courtesy — and they used that access to file a competing patent before he even knew what was happening. The House of Lords then ruled against him on a technicality. That's a hell of a story to find buried in a chemistry article.

Burning proceeds from the exposed surface of each grain inward, following Piobert's law. This means grain geometry directly controls burn rate.

This is the part every handloader should actually understand before they start swapping powders by feel. When you switch from a flake pistol powder to a ball powder and wonder why pressure curves look different — this is the mechanism. Grain shape isn't cosmetic.

Through the 1920s, Fred Olsen worked at Picatinny Arsenal salvaging tons of single-base cannon powder manufactured for World War I. He was hired by Western Cartridge Company in 1929 and by 1933 had developed a process for manufacturing spherical smokeless powder — the ball powder that handloaders still use today.

Hodgdon H110, Accurate No. 9, Winchester 296 — the lineage runs straight back to a guy salvaging surplus artillery powder during the Depression. That's not a detail you usually get when you're reading the back of a powder jug.

Stored powder should be periodically tested — when stabilizer is depleted, auto-ignition becomes a real risk.

Most people storing cans of Varget in a closet have never thought about stabilizer depletion. Older surplus military powder especially — if you've got sealed tins from an estate sale or a gun show table, this isn't paranoia, it's a real consideration.

For those of you who reload: when you switched powder types — whether for a new cartridge, availability issues, or just experimenting — what actually drove the decision, and did you end up working up loads from scratch or trusting existing data?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team