Re: Homemade BP for shooting

You certainly can use your home-made powder for shooting your flintlock pistol.
You will probably find that the ball-milled meal is a faster, better pan powder
than GOEX 4Fg. I use meal in the pan in my c. 1790 English flintlock shotgun and
have found this to be the case. I introduced a couple of shooting friends to it,
and they agreed with me!

As for your load, just experiment until you find one that shoots to your
pistol's sights, same as you would do with any black powder load. Usually these
weapons were made to shoot with a given load, and sighted for that - when you
bought your pistol, were there any accessories, such as a flask or powder scoop,
accompanying it? These can give you a point of departure. You may have to adjust
for your powder up or down by a few grains until you are hitting consistently.

What kind of pistol is yours? Is it an officer's pistol or a dueller? Smooth or
rifled bore? (it may pay to look closely, since duellers were supposed to be
smooth, but often had shallow rifling, and were smooth for only an inch or so at
the muzzle - sometimes one of a pair was this way, the other completely smooth -
this was cheating, but many makers including Joe Manton were willing to
accommodate!) The usual duelling distance was as little as 12 paces. An
officer's pistol would be expected to have a bit longer point-blank range. D.
Keith Neal's books are excellent sources of information for making these old
weapons shoot as they were intended to do.

That your grain powder is less dense than GOEX is not necessarily a bad thing.
High-grade powders of the nineteenth century were often not as dense as current
GOEX powder, particularly when they were intended for shotgun use. Also, the
best powders were unglazed. Current GOEX resembles the powder traded to African
and South American natives. The recently imported powder from KiK is less dense
than GOEX and also faster.




In article <1146379134.570871.206790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Yuv says...

I want (as if I have a choise...) to shoot my flintlock pistol with
homemade BP.

Loading information refers to commercial BP. How do I go about using
the homemade?

Currently I make 75-15-10, ballmilled for 4 hours and pressed moist
(for corning) by hammering. The resulting density is about 1.3-1.4 gram
per cubic centimeter. AFAIK, commercial is about 1.75.

Charcoal is wipping willow, but it's homemade, so it's probably not at
it's best.

Naturaly, I can "play" with grain size (or mixture of sizes).

Any suggestion or info?

thanks,
Yuv



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