The powder situation.....

[CT_Shooter]

[Mags]

I don't know where you'd get quantities of Vitamin C that you'd need. We got small fiberpak drums of it from the production facility, very high purity, but I don't know if that was a necessity. It's what we used though. And our Potassium Nitrate was purchased from Fisher or Aldrich, also highest grade materials. It had to be blended, and we had lab and pilot scale blenders for that. We also compacted it in a pellet press that our machine shop built for out purpose. Pelletized material was then seived to isolate specific particle size product to do burn rate testing on. First though, was a complete evaluation of the process by the Safety and Industrial Hygiene group, with those engineers taking part in our determinations of whether it was pressure sensitive or not, what the flash point was of the components and the finished product, and how stable the product was, including long term degradation during storage. It's not as simple as it sounds, and there were more than a few Rube Goldberg looking set-ups to help with determining these things. That part was actually the fun part. We had blast cells at the back end of the building, with 24" thick poured concrete walls, where we would run hydrogenations and other potentially violent reactions, at least until we got a good handle on reaction kinetics. Those were some fun times. While we never had anything really take off, with this process or anything else we ran in those blast cells, it was comforting to know the bad stuff was on the other side of those thick walls when we started everything.

That sounds like really fun and interesting project/product. Thank you for sharing your story!

[BigAl52]

Ive made it to the Gulf one more time for the winter. Yesterday it was cool and windy but we still went to the local Corpus Christi gun club and shot some skeet. They sell powder there. I saw 1lb and 8lbers of Unique. Price was 58.00 on the 1lb and 363.00 for the 8lb. There was also some Green Dot and quit a few of the Reloader series of powders. I dont need anything that they have I did see some others there for pitol loading but Im good for now. Nice to know though that Unique is still around at least down here it is.

[fortyshooter]

58 bucks a pound??? And it must what is left in inventory since Alliant has cranked up production again!

[BigAl52]

Last year at this time the gun club had Unique. It was the same price and they were out of 8lbers. I have no clue if this is current or older production but the 8 lb price is current.

[Vaquero]

+++

RP

[Vaquero]

Glad I found the 8 pounder that I did a couple months back. $320 plus a little gas.
With the 4+ lbs. I already had, I should be set for a good while.

RP