Why I Traveled To the Hottest Place on Earth for this Yellow Rock
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- Опубликовано: 7 июн 2023
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Brimstone, or sulfur, is one of the key ingredients in black powder, and the last chemical needed to enter the age of gunpowder. Death Valley is one of the few places where sulfur can be easily found on the surface, but it will still take some refining to be useful. In this episode, I show you what it takes to make fire from stone.
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Another distilling technique, for materials with low melting point, is to dip a glass/steel rod into the molten material. This plates a thin layer of the lowest melting point material by cooling it out of solution. Remove the rod, scrape off the material, cool the rod, dry it, and dip again. It's sorta like dipping wicks to make candles.
Good suggestion. I'm commenting to increase its visibility.
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Thanks!Very Interrestig.
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I assume you have already done some research for purification but if you want some suggestions. For the Potassium Nitrate re crystallization from hot water would be my suggestion but filter the material while hot through as fine of mesh as you have. Allow the material to crystallize slowly by covering it to prevent the water from escaping. Don't allow it to go to dryness. Filter out the crystals that form first before it is totally dry and it should help remove some of the impurities. For the sulfur there are two routes. The first is evaporation. When hot, sulfur can evaporate fairly easily as long as you keep it below 159 C Have a cooled piece of glass or metal above your heated pot of impure sulfur and it will slowly grow sulfur on the cooled surface. The other option is to extract it with a hot solvent. Toluene or Xylenes works well for this and grows very nice sulfur crystals. Not sure if that is a technology you have unlocked yet so I would probably go with the sublimation method. Another fun thing you can do with sulfur is heat it above 159 C (I would heat it above 180 just so it goes faster) and it will change from a liquid to a viscous material called polysulfur. Its a polymer that is composed entirely of sulfur. Upon cooling it will turn back into crystalline sulfur over time but if you can safely handle it at these high temperatures its stretchy like rubber. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I did a good chunk of my PhD work with elemental sulfur and enjoy sharing what I know.
Bump
Bump. If he boiled the sulfur couldn't he just funnel the gas's into/thru water to rapid cool it out from gas to solid? If done right, it would end up forming chunks on the bottom of the jar.
Bump
Thanks for sharing. Very in depth and interesting. You seem awesome. I wish you were my friend! ❤️😊👍
Thanks for telling us that.
@@christopherrenn8137 kinda, what you would get at first would be a very fine emulsion of sulphur suspended in the water. Then crystals will form from the emulsified particles and collect on every surface, but because sulphur is also hydrophobic a lot will get caught in the surface tension at the top and float. But unfortunately you're also going to end with a fair amount of waste as some of it will still escape in a gaseous form, while some will be converted into sulfurous acid as it reacts with the water and dissolved oxygen, not much but it will happen. The biggest problem I think will be collecting it from the sides of the container. I haven't tried your method so I can't say exactly how it will go, but it will work, it just won't be as efficient or clean as collecting from a condensing tube as op suggested. The other problem is if your transfer plumbing isn't kept hot, it will likely clog and you risk pressuring the system, which you absolutely do not want. It's also a huge pain to clean from inner surfaces that you plan to use for other things. If you're equipment is dedicated to only sulphur refinement, then it's fine and no worries.
With a sufficiently long tube to maximize condensation you can expect a decently efficient yield,
Next video: Gathering Uranium ore to make enriched uranium
Codyslab did that
@@cob571 whattt
@@alessandrogini5283 yeah, good video honestly
@@cob571 he was forced to stop by the feds though
@@jasonrichardson1999 fbi agents gotta be sometimes pulling out their hair as they watch some of cody's videos. everything from the uranium refining to nitro glycerin tutorial videos, lmao.
You haven't ground the powder nearly fine enough! That's why a ball mill is used to grind and mix the components!!! It needs to be extremely fine ground in order for the three chemicals to be adequately mixed and in close proximity to themselves! it can then be wetted and pelletized to whatever grain size is needed and then dried for use! Also, your potassium nitrate is extremely dirty, it should be as close to a white powder as you can get it.
The KNO3 is probably fine. its just brown. he used the good looking crystals on top. If it were very dirty there would never be such nice crystals so the purity is over likely over 98% which is fine. But He should definetly have it ground and mixed better.
@@DerHenker_ You can get great crystals even with substantial impurities! The issue is also depending on what the impurities are they can massively impact the chemical reaction you are looking for! It needs to be as pure as possible for the best reaction! In this case it needs to decompose at temperature to provide the Oxygen for the reaction! Anything that retards that process is going to substantially reduce the effectiveness of the Gunpowder! I have made a great deal of Black Powder being a Historical Reinacter, the purity of the Potassium Nitrate effects the end product much more than dirty Sulfur or Carbon! It literally is the difference between a fizzle and a boom when it comes to using it in a Blackpowder Gun of any kind. I have found that using Bat Guano is much better than Chicken manure also you can get very pure Potasium nitrate crystals from bat caves as it leches out and forms on the cave walls.
Gonna have to save the video before youtube removes it like it did with Cody's vids on gunpowder 🤔
And Brandon's video
The title and thumbnail wording has changed
You could try adding water to your gunpowder mixture and continuing to grind the wet paste, I understand that was a historical technique for improving the quality of your gunpowder, if your ratios of ingredients are correct the only concern is getting that mixture as fine and homogenous as possible, and grinding it while it is a paste apparently helps a lot with that.
Corning here might be a questionable choice IMO. It's a great next step dont get me wrong, but it kind of presumes you have ratios and techniques down first. It's more of an "advanced step" than a "quick fix" kinda deal as far as I know. I'd love to see him try it once he get's black powder working though, maybe compare the two?
Use alcohol, its a process called Corning, where you grind it wet and then compress it
@@aaroncampf @martinrose3251 thanks guys, I knew it had a name but I read about it years ago and had forgotten. Definitely agree it's important his ratios and techniques are solid, and no doubt his main plan of increasing purification is good as well, that saltpeter didn't exactly look the best.
I tried doing the thing you mentioned once, adding water and turn it into wet paste, but in pestle and mortar. The salpeter recrystallized once it dried, unfortunately, making the dried paste ununiform and I had to re grind it again. But to my experience, moistening the mixture up a bit makes it much easier to grind (and safer!) than when it is completely dry.
@@aaroncampf yes, that improves the quality greatly. In my personal experience, without wetting it, it doesn't really work.
An easier way would be through goldpanning to get fools gold also called pyrite containing 50 percent iron 47 percent sulfur using a pot in pot boiler over fire you can separate the sulpher from the iron as a residue on top and separate the iron slag to melt into one ore
Please do not grind your mixed black powder :P Grind the components beforehand and mix them by gently stirring them together. Loosing some fingers isn't too likely with a mixture like this, but it would be a bad day if your batch decided to auto-ignite in your mortar.
Aside from that, I look forward to seeing a video of the refined version!
Agreed - scared the shit out of me when he started grinding it all together.
@@PatGilliland blowing on the burning sulfur dust got me. Made me recall the time my chemistry teach ignited airborne powder as a demo (think it was just powdered sugar)
In stead of stirring, I would suggest using 'paper-mixing'. Sheet of paper as a vessel. Make heap of ingredients in the middle and then mix it by picking up the paper on one side, then the other side etc. You get a rolling mixing that is quite safe and if it does go wrong there is nothing to be launched in your face except for flames....
Did they mix it wet in the past?
@@grandvivant yeah I shouted “no! What are you doing!” at my screen lol.
Then the completely nonplussed “that just made it burn better” sent me and I was going “of course it did, you’re just lucky it’s not so pure” lmao
"Oh look an abandoned mine in the middle of death valley at the end of an unplanned solo three mile hike. If something were to happen it could take days to find me... Well, in I go!"
Glad you made it back. Please don't do that again.
yeah, all this AND he's by himself, talk about asking for something bad to happen. at least take someone with you next time
Clearly isn't solo, someone is filming, dummy. And I guarantee they have prepared beforehand.
Jesus Christ, that was genuinely one of the most reckless, dangerous things I've ever seen done on RUclips. He didn't even have water.
The most important aspect for purity is the KNO3 -- the Saltpetre. I used to use sulfur prills that have a small amount of clay in them. Made some very very good Blackpowder back in the day. Your KNO3 looks, I have to say, "not optimal".
Yeah he should've recrystalized it a couple of times
"Not optimal"
For anyone that isn't versed in subtly, he means it looks just as bad as the chicken crap it was made from.
Your next goal, of course, is to build a homemade cannon from bamboo so you can take care of the Gorn.
If he has the time, Doctor. If he has the time.
@@matthewellisor5835 I like hanging out with my PEEPS !
If so, hopefully he'd go out to Red Rocks to test it out.
Maybe he can build some type of rudimentary lathe.
A town in Louisiana gained its name for the mineral that was mined there: Sulphur. Back in the day, a fellow by the name of Herman Frasch developed a method of extracting the mineral more efficiently using steam. This might be of benefit to your endeavor.
For the salt peter, just find a farm area, that has slow running water/pond area.. (especially any cattle farm or pig farm area) and look around a low / mushy/swampy area for the white powder.. that white powder is a nitrate powder byproduct.. which is easily gathered into a bucket, and then you can water wash it to continue separating contaminants.
The biggest problem with the gunpowder was most likely the potassium nitrate, not the sulfur. The sulfur burning looked actually pretty nice
Agreed, there is also the added possibility of damp charcoal.
they used to burn trees faster than can be replaced take the ash and dump it in water to make potash, then they'd put it in manure to make salt peter.
@@35manning yeah, that charcoal looked quite damp when he was mashing it.
@@KainYusanagi: Dampness isn't so much the issue. The process of "corning" soaks gunpowder with water so that it dries in clumps, or corns (hence the name). These corns of gunpowder rest side by side with airflow in-between, causing the fire to shoot between the corns. As a powder, there is much less airflow, so it burns much slower.
@@DarkPegasus87This. You can effectively make it into grains/corns by wetting it with alcohol and then pushing it through a mesh sieve
For more pure saltpeter, saturate it a LOT. Dissolve as much as possible into the water. Let it sit and settle with all the water until you get a nice separation of the organics and chemicals. Absorb as much liquid as you can with cotton and wring the cotton out thoroughly. Let that sit and evaporate (you can boil it gently to speed the process) until you are left with relatively pure saltpeter.
For higher purity carbon, get a large sealable metal canister that you can fit a lot of wood chunks in, and punch a small (1mm) hole in the lid. Put the canister in a fire and “cook” it until the flames are no longer shooting out the hole in the lid. Then let it naturally cool. You will be left with very pure charcoal.
As for the sulfur, the best extraction process I have seen for that, that doesn’t require modern chemicals, is to light mostly pure sulfur in fire and let it melt itself (you will get a bright red liquid). Once the source stops draining the sulfur liquid extinguish the flame and let it cool. Collect the now solidified puddles and crush into a fine powder.
All doable with the technologies you currently have. (For the charcoal, you can use a clay vessel with a tight fitting lid with no need to vent it)
Need to get NileRed to kick your chemistry up a notch
Along with purity, the ratios of the ingredients to each other are important. You only really need about 2 parts sulfur and 3 parts charcoal, but the amount of saltpetre needs to be *much* higher, like about 15 (there's a Leslie Fish song about this, probably called 'Black Powder and Alcohol'), *especially* if you have difficulty purifying it enough.
75% charcoal
15% saltperter
10% sulfur
That's the proper ratio.
@@DH-xw6jp You have reversed the saltpeter and charcoal, my good man.
You're supposed to harvest the saltpeter crystals from the chicken poo, not grind up the entire piece. Those bits that were sparking and flaming were the spots where the actual saltpeter was present.
He didn't "grind up the entire piece", he says that he would scrape some off the top layers, 11:23
Loving the apothecary idea. Makes it really clear which elements are already unlocked. I would love to see you master purification processes.
Try using a double boiler method to melt and separate the sulfur. If you use oil or fat in the bottom pot you should be able to keep the temperature steady just above the melting point of sulfur without risk of ignition from inconsistent heating from a flame. This also means you could keep it molten for a longer period of time to allow gravity to separate some of the materials for you based on their densities.
I love how the set reminds me of a medieval apothecary hahah.
Crystallisation being such a common purification process, and seemingly changing the nature of the substance, lends a bit more context to historical myth often involving a special magic crystal or a magically-purified substance which works so much better than the local product.
I also really liked how the sulphur looked after that first crystallisation, when it was one brittle brick. I wonder if your purification process wasn’t adding oxides back in or something… since it started out really yellow but got lighter and greyer as it went.
I shoot blackpowder semi-regularly, and I occasionally make my own powder. The type of wood you use to make the charcoal is VERY important, as is the purity of the other ingredients. next issue is how long you mill it for. Generally speaking you need to use a ball mill for at least 24 hours with either lead or brass tumbling media. Just using a mortar and pestle for a few minutes won't get you very far.
Nah, the type doesn't matter, you just need to make the charcoal pure enough (and type of tree merely matters in terms of how hard that part is). I agree that simply picking it from a random campfire is going to be subpar though. One of the purer setups I have seen on youtube was iirc some guy who truly cooked it into separate parts - because he was after the tar and the wood-gas. So the charcoal itself that remained ended up rather pure too.
@feha92 everything Blackpowder says otherwise. Willow, silver maple, Alder Buckthorn, and Balsawood make good powder. Oak, pine, and other woods not so much.
@@TheStraycat74 then they say wrong. If they said that the type of wood is important to ease the production of pure carbon, they would be correct. Or if they said that some types of wood contains impurities that result in a blackpowder-derovative with even better effect.
But blackpowder only ask for carbon from the coal (the recipe only has three ingredients), so the type really doesn't matter once you extracted 100% pure carbon
@@feha92 soo EverythingBlackpowder. ErasGoneBulletMolds, Hoffman Reproductions, Lame Beaver Trading, and a BUNCh of other people that have videos on making blackpowder, show how it's done, and have done testing On Screen are ALL WRONG, but some nameless commenter is 100% and I should just ignore my own personal tests and trust some rando...
ok, pal. no problem.
@@feha92it’s not about the impurities in the wood. The willow trees produce charcoal with a larger surface area. Even though it looks exactly the same the difference in surface on each particle is actually quite large. Hence a faster reaction.
you got ahold of Brent? sweet, I love all of the collaborations I've seen so far with him! I actually came upon him through the Diesel Brothers? and haven't stopped watching since :) glad to see more and more of those youtubers that I find worth watching branching out and connecting with each other. It makes for fantastic cross-content and awareness of many MANY things that make someone a well-rounded individual when it comes to knowledge of things and how they work
Little tip. Use the chicken or pidgeon crap dirrectly to extract not the dirt. Go to a guy keeping pidgeons to get straight droppings. It will work beter
Loving this series. Cody from Cody's lab may have some tips on refining to increase purity.
Is it "impurities" or is your charcoal damp as heck? Like dont get me wrong your saltpetre and sulphur were impure as anything but just plain ground charcoal burns better than that so I'm guessing your charcoal was damp.
Both!
That's also not Charcoal. Charcoal is burned in a low oxygen environment, think briquettes.
@@TheRealWilliamWhite True, but I was trying to give credit, seeing as how those also certainly weren't Sulphur nor Saltpetre either. Though Charcoal is definitely the lowest bar here. He'll get there. I believe!
Dissolve the salt peter in near boiling distilled water. Pour it into a fresh container, leaving behind any undissolved material. Then let it slowly cool to room temp. Pour off the water into another beaker/jug and collect the crystals left behind. That should help purify your salt peter a bit. Salt peter crystals should come out white, not red.
looking forward to when he makes a 3d printer only with bauxite, calcopirite and sand
That is a really cool apothecary setup, definitely a must have for when society gets thrown back to the stone age.
HTME....... See what i mean.
Too many people know too much. It only took us 3,000 years to go from hunter gatherers to civilization because it took that long for us to discover enough edible crops to reliably feed large groups of people through the winter with renewably stockpilable non-perishables. (Wheat, maize, rice) The 4,000 year sprint from the inception of civilization to pre-industrial modernity was handicapped by the burnings of libraries, poor experimental methodologies and the desire to privately monopolize discoveries leading many inventions to go underutilized and be forgotten with the death of their creators (Damascus steel, electricity in 250 CE with the Baghdad Battery- I'm noticing a trend that most of the lost inventions were Arabian in origin... Shame how their society's collapse set humanity back 1,800~ years...) All it took to enable the industrial revolution was a diversified post collumbian exchange food supply driven population boom followed by a stretch of 200 years of relative peace being followed by the shift away from the overconsumption of alchohol (depressant) as a clean source of drinking water towards coffee and tea (stimulants) as the enlightenment dawned (turns out when you drink caffinated beverages instead of swil-shine you can think for yourselves) and allowed for the creation of the standardized scientific method (replaced trial and error) and encouraged pier reviews which created a culture of sharing discoveries to be verfified- all of which is to say:
Humanity would be back to post industrial levels of technology within 60 years tops. Electricity is crazy simple to generate and there is simply too much abundant scrap metal. Creating copper from ore is hard, creating copper from scrap copper is easy. If society needed to rebuild it'd be much easier than building it the first time.
@@bodaciouschad it isn't reliable to say that the Baghdad battery was intended to be a battery though, but you'd be right if you mentioned the many times in history that a steam engine was made only to be used for something random. I dont remember fully but some Turkish man built the "first" steam engine to churn butter or something like that.
@@themenacingpenguin.7152It was to mix alcohol, what a Chad.
@@bodaciouschad the baghdad battery wasn't actually a battery. It would not make sense for it to be a battery, as you couldn't measure or use the electricity in any way.
Haven’t been around the videos for a while, but glad to see you’re bouncing back from the fire!
It makes my day when you drop new videos
Very cool idea and adventure to follow along
9:22 staining "POP!"
So relatable. ❤
Purify the potassium nitrate by precipitation of crystal in cooled solution and filtering iut the crystals from the liquid.
Never grind combined dry components. Either grind wet or separately. Always be cautious of static sparks with dry powder.
When I was a child I had a peice of sulfur ore which I purified by crushing and boiling. Sulphur seems to separate from the heavier stone and float apon the surface of the water
Cant wait to see the next attempt!
With your saltpeter, you ought to try and bake it at a low temp to drive out any water. Remember that potassium nitrate is hydrophilic.
I think if you paid attention to sizes when filtering it would go better, like if you only crushed to like 1/8" then the sulfer could melt off it and you could capture the larger stone chunks in the cheese cloth.
awesome channel as always
You need to moisten the gunpowder, then let it dry, before it's actually considered "black powder". Getting it a tiny bit wet allows the KNO3 to dissolve and soak into the carbon/charcoal, which hugely improves the burning characteristics after it's been allowed to dry out again. Pretty sure they called it "green powder" before the wet/dry cycle had been performed.
If grinding black powder, use a brass or ceramic mortar and pestle as they're non-sparking, or grind the ingredients individually. You want cornstarch fineness!
You can stir in a very small amount of water after mixing the components to make coarser granules, which should dry fairly quickly in the sun.
As a blacksmith and amateur herbalist, I'm really enjoying the setup!
The shelf is so cool
Love the apothecary! It's really cute and a fun idea
sulfur also does polymerize with itself, and can get funky colors depending on the stage of polymerization. ur standard yellow sulfur is S8 and the polymerized molecule is a ring
you and Brent are gonna be the best Collab of the century. I am so excited
Needed water when mixing and needed to corn it
Love to see a colab with Cody from Cody's Lab refining chemicals!
Next Time on HTME! - Mining Sulphur to create chemical weaponry! 🤣
HTME: Exploring the mysteries of sulfur-based gasses
@@dominiczibuda5232 HTME: Making tactical nukes from pure uranium
I think as you progress through time reinventing machines and tech, one thing on the list should definitely be the telephone. That would be very interesting to see!
I would love to see NileRed come on your videos
can't wait to see the handgonnes
The Chad Phoenix brings to life yet another beautiful video!
Will you and Captain Kirk be using it to fight the Gorns?
Good video!
I look forward to seeing the evolution of firearms in this series, it would be really cool to see you guys make fire spears, hand cannons, harquebuses, matchlocks and muskets
And why not, also have the work to make metallic cartridges when you "discover" the fulminants
Can you make for the next video musket plz (i love your videos❤)
Glad you didn’t die!
For the black powder, mix and grind it wet. The potassium nitrate will dissolve in the water and when dried out will redeposit into the charcoal. Maybe worth a shot.
Just as fun to watch the gathering as it is to watch the assembly.
This is so cool!
I've actually extracted elemental sulphur from a porous ore like this before, and the best way is by dissolving in a solution of xylene. The good news is that xylene is readily available, the bad news is that it's really flammable. The process is like boiling gasoline and not something you should attempt without the proper safety precautions.
Also,.one of the toughest problems with home made gunpowder is getting the particle size right, mixing properly, and removing moisture. Removing moisture is the hardest part because depending on your method you're much more likely to injure yourself.
Or, after grinding you could put it in a pressure cooker with water.
You can also recrystallize sulfur from xylene as well
Im actually excited to see the apocathery being filled,
I guess you should look into petroleum next. You could extract solvents to try and recrystallize sulfur, as sulfur in its elemental form is made of eight-membered rings, hence it's soluble in hot organic solvents like toluene.
it's a rock of fire.
Rock a fire explosion
I read Its best if everything is mixed homogenously, for a more homogenous mixture after combining all dry ingredients of your black powder add 95-100 percent ethanol drop by drop until it has gone from a paste to just barely becoming a slurry while thoroughly mixing. Pour into shallow pan and allow it to dry in a well ventilated area but dont let it sit around to exposed air for too long, its hygroscopic and damp black powder might not ignite properly like what happened with your mixture
Sulfur being soul with a blue flame is so interesting! In the time of Alchemy, "Al" meaning "the" and "chemy" meaning "chemistry", so The Chemistry, sulfur was one of the alchemical Three Primes, of which material substances are composed, sulfur, that is, soul, the principle of combustibility 🜍, mercury or spirit, the principle of fusibility and volatility ☿, and salt or body, the principle of non-combustibility and non-volatility 🜔
try thermal distilling it in an iron pipe or glass botle while runing a garden hose through a bucket of cold water attach to the other side a cold surface like rock
You might have more luck making saltpeter from your own urine rather than trying to ise chicken feces. I understand that the old timers used to mix their home made gunpowder with urine, forming it into a cake, and crumbling it up once dried. Sometimes they used iron oxide refined from well water if pure enough sulphur wasn't available too.
There is some information on this in one of the Foxfire books.
That mine looks like a mud pot/mud volcano. They can sometimes occur in seemingly random areas far away from any volcanically active areas.
for the KNO3 you should probably just disolve it in water and filter it through coffe filter or cotton or somethink like that, than one more recrystalisation and it should be fine.
You need to mill the powder in a rock tumbler with non conductive media (like musket balls), and classify the powder with isopropyl & fine sieves.
As it stands, you have small particles of those 3 ingredients sitting loose in a pile, not bonded together in tiny crumbs like it should be.
There is an Appalachian recipe for black powder that uses iron oxide (rust) as a substute for Sulphur, which was not commonly occuring in nature, in Appalachia.
With the nitrate, dissolve it in a bit more water than it needs, let the gunk settle out and decant the solution with the nitrate still dissolved, then let it sit until you have good crystals (but still have liquid) and then take the very pure crystals. The liquid will still have nitrate so you can boil it down a little and as it cools it should form more crystals.
Good ol Yuma Arizona lol I miss Death Valley
Gonna need a ball or stone mill before completing this project. In order to get a powder that’s going to be well combined and uniform enough to make a good gunpowder it’ll need about 8-12 hours of milling time.
making black powder is a much more in depth process than just mixing it after grinding it, processes such as "Corning" were discovered in the renaissance era and served to greatly improve the explosive properties of the black powder. during the first step separate the powder and mill it as finely as possible
It would be interesting to see a video of mineral fertilize from scratch
Wait when did you invent or make the drone. Think i missed something. great videos
The crystals in that cookie were square like salt, not needles like saltpeter.
Fun fact: This is one of those places where brass has an advantage over iron. Iron can strike sparks, which could lead to things going very bad in the wrong environment, while brass won't do that, removing a potential source of ignition
If my vague recollection of the proper ratios as well as my eyeball measurement is correct you need more saltpeter and less sulfur in your mixture.
oxidize the sulpher to make sulphiric acid. add salt peter to make nitric acid, then nitrate some cotton to make nitrocelulose
One step at a time grasshopper.
He needs to get reliable at refining the base chemicals before he starts the fun stuff.
I'll be back in a few days when I have time
You should refine your salt peter. Most nitrate salts which are probably biggest contaminate in your salt peter are higroacopic and take moisture from air, thats why you could light your gunpowder after some heating but it would stop burning. Dont worry there is an easy fix to that. Since KOH (potash) is quite strong base just add soluble part of wood ash to your mix (which contains KOH) it will react with your nitrate salts and produce KNO3 which isn't hygroscopic. Also there is a lot of urea impurities, thats why you should do a proper boiling water --> ice cold recrystallization after KOH part. Also in gunpowder making chorcoal type is very important for burning, eg. Willow tree is one of the best. And your chorcoal needs to be dry.
If you need more explaining write a comment I can help you, I know some chem, and DIY bushcraft thingy.
Ps don't throw away the gunpowder you can dissolve the saltpetre from it, and the rest won't dissolve. I saw how long it took you to make it, it would be a big waste to throw it away.
Better watch this before RUclips kills it
Definitely need to grind the components much finer. Should be “airfloat” ideally ball milling for a few hours. Then to really increase the burn rate it needs to be granulated. Mix in 3-5% dextrin (baked corn starch) as a binder and add water to make a thick dough. Then press that through a screen and let dry. I’d love to see the results of the raw impure ingredients turned into granulated hun powder. I’m willing to bet the results would be pretty decent!
Using this technique with pure ingredients I have made pyrotechnic gunpowder for lots of homemade fireworks. Just finished a batch today actually. Getting ready for the 4th of July!
I think you need a ball mill to get the black powder ingredients really fine for a more even +faster burn
What are those glass bottles made out of? Like is it just a friction fit, or is thst a wax or silicone seal? They look neat.
You need more KNO3. KNO3 needs to be the majority of the content.
Even with the results it is still very impressive. 😊
you should make gunpowder charcoal by heating hazel wood in a Dutch oven until it off gases and carbonizes instead of burning it in a camp fire. Gunpowder also needs to go through a wet phase. Get your mixture wet and compress it into bricks or cakes. Let it dry and then carefully grind it. It will burn with more bang than fizzle. What you made is called serpentine gunpowder. Fun but iffy. And the ratios are also not one of each part. Ideally you will want 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal and 10% sulfur.
You can also collect pure potassium nitrate in old dirt basements. It looks like little balls of cotton or spiderwebs growing out of the side of the walls.
That first thing you came across was an abandoned mine shaft. There should be a dungeon with a mob spawner nearby
Nigel at Nile Red/Blue might be able to help with purification.
So have you added any more chemicals to your shelf yet? You already had a few others before you shot this. You've got the saltpetre (although you really need to work on purifying it better), and you've done lye, and the sulphuric acid, and I'd say you could include lime and distilled alcohol, too.
Are you still planning to do nitric acid soon? Any plans for turpentine? It sounds pretty easy from what I've read (and you get rosin as a byproduct).
Funny thing sulfer is only a stabilizer for the reaction. The earliest versions of gunpowder did not use it but were far more unpredictable in burn rate and gas production. More sulfur or charcoal means a slower burn.
That and the ignition point lowering were rwally why it was used.
Ahh, brings me back to that time we made gunpowder in chemistry class, good times.
I looked it up and it seems like distillation is the common method of purifying sulfur so maybe you could give that a go?
I think you have to corn the gun powder also by adding water, mixing and letting it dry
The sulfur is just hot enough for ignition so yeah that saltpeter is definitely the main issue. It should ignite with difficulty even without any sulfer in it.
2 things to try with the same ingredients finer grinding and more saltpeter per amount of charcoal. You could try and use a basic sand filter on the saltpeter to remove particulates after dissolving it back into water or solution.
Sulfur would also be useful for recreating rubber, for vulcanizing.