Explosive vs Gunpowder

Creation of balls or chunks of black powder that are for most purposes unbreakable can be done with various binders. Small amounts of starch, glue, gelatin, and many other products can be added to water as the slurry is mixed. Press it into molds and compress the wet mush. I've heard that it can be dried in a food dehydrator.

The very small traces of binder can prevent dusting, breakage, other problems. Using only a tiny amount of flammable binder compounds allows the flame to travel properly.
 
When the Dupont? plant shut down here in Washington state they had a large amount of black powder that was to be "disposed of". They contacted the local fire folks and started pulling trucks in dumping the powder like it was sawdust.
When the fire marshal showed up he let them know that they had to spread it so it was no thicker than (I think it was a foot or so) and so they spread it out over a very large area at about 8 inches thick. It was inspected and determined to be acceptable. This was about 20000 square feet - nearly fifty feet on a side in a rough square.

The fire marshal had an explosives expert use an "electric match" (think model rocket igniter) to touch it off at one corner. Spectators were moved back and all the people involved moved to an area determined to be safe and the switch was thrown.

It was a dramatic moment until the first flash was seen and it felt for an instant like a huge disappointment until it felt like Paul Bunyan had hit the ground with a gigantic dead-blow hammer. There was no Hollywood like explosion just a low thud that you felt from head to toe and a light cloud of whitish smoke. The impact was felt throughout a wide area as far away as Issaquah and Seattle. It made the nightly news to let people know it was not an earth quake but just a bunch of black powder that was destroyed as waste.

The fire marshal said that if they had tried to ignite it in one big pile it would have been a very large explosion that would have killed folks near by. It was great to be a witness to it and gave me a whole new respect for my black powder cannon.
 
Fifty by fifty, almost a foot deep, 2,500 square feet, 300 square yards, work out to be about ten square yards to a normal pallet load, so for example, I guess that it would be short of two tractor trailer loads in canisters?

Dumped out flat and ignited,that must have been one monstrous boom. I don't think that it was a particularly great idea. If I was going to set that off, I'd have had sprinklers set on it for a while to slow it down a bit.

It was felt and heard many miles away? Wow.

I think that the very best situation, most optimal way of disposing of it, would base been to find a way of disposing of it by thin l y sprinkling it on fields and letting the stuff break down into fertilizer. That would have been great for golf courses. One application could have done it, spread so finely that a chain reaction would have almost impossible.

A true detonation would have been like setting off a handful of military one ton bombs, I suspect.
 
I just can't remember right now, but DuPont did manufacture bP for decades, as did Hercules, and I believe that DuPont divested the bp business maybe forty years ago.

We had two plants here since the forties, I guess. One was "atlas powder" that mostly made nitrates and commercial explosives. The other one is "Hercules" and iirc, has never done anything but creating dynamite.

An interesting side note, some idiot who worked there started stealing sticks from the crates before they were sealed, one at a time.. Every crate is weighed as it is filled, and every stick that disappeared was noted on production records. He only did it a few times before the company caught him.

ahh, they'll never notice a stick or two every week or so.
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:rolleyes:
 
In 2012 I transferred into a field where the Counter IED fight was a high priority. I found that DTIC was a great resource for coming to the obvious conclusion, "You can make an IED out of anything."

Here is a .pdf which shows some smokeless powders do detonate with commercial blasting caps: www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ada491715

Here is a .pdf which describes grain size in relation to ease of detonation for propellents: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a100726.pdf

Here is the technical report on efforts to make C4 even less shock sensitive, as it passes the bullet test, but not the sympathetic detonation and jet blast tests: http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2009/insensitive/10Aowens.pdf

Jimro
 
I read that in til I nearly gave myself a migraine. I don't like arguing against experts, but noted several things that looked off.

The strongest objection I have is their claim that a bag of powder hung from a string will detonate if a standard cap was fired inside the bag. Anything that can "detonate" in a barely enclosed space with only a few grams of primer compound couldn't possibly be safe to pack into ammunition, ignited with identical compounds, and compressed to 50,000 psi.

One of those listed issues involved powder upset in explosive bolt setting blanks

Just my own personal thoughts, but that source seems less than trustworthy.

I've said all that I want to say about it, it is too complicated for me to follow, and it seems to strongly contradict many other reliable documents.
 
Weren't they even making ieds out of tanks of propane and jugs of bleach, set off by a spray of tracers, using the bleach as a low grade chemical weapon?

Kind of makes you look back at the sharpened sticks of Vietnam with wistful nostalgia.
 
Dry bleach powder as an oxidizer? yup seen that. All sorts of ways to make things explode. IEDs in the US have been made out of powder recovered from fireworks shoved into a pressure cooker (Boston marathon bombing), and gunpowder into a pipe (Atlanta Olympic Bombing), as well as ANNM (Oklahoma City). Heck, the more enterprising bad guys would even buy metallic flake paint and process the aluminum out of it to make ANAL based HME.

I remember one memoir from an old WWII Soldier who described a way to rubble a factory by using a lifting charge to make a fuel air mixture out of floor sweepings and then set it off with another explosive. The sudden change in ambient pressure sucked brick buildings in on themselves rather nicely. Anyone who's ever seen a grain silo go up from the dust igniting has seen the same principle in action.

But, in any case, a lot of things that shouldn't be "explosive" can be made to do so, and smokeless powder is one of them. But I'm glad it is difficult to do because I rather enjoy reloading as a way to shoot more for the same amount of money.

Jimro
 
The sawdust bomb done like that is certainly a new one to me. I've seen a flour flash, and I was impressed. You could probably even set up a leaf blower and a primus stove to do that.

I'm pretty sure I told this story, but I was attending a seminar at the police academy and met a genuine nut. A dyed in the wool, they put a microchip in my butt, Kennedy shot himself nut. He explained that ok city was actually hit by a fuel air munition delivered by stealth aircraft and McVeigh was a willing patsy/martyr. Anyone with any knowledge knows that an air burst fuel air system wont scoop a building out like that, but seriously, he has been tracked by a tiny microchip in his butt since he served in Vietnam. He saw it on x rays.

Fuel and air bombs don't detonate, right? The flame front causes ignition, that's too slow, right?
 
you can't set off a can of gunpowder like a stick of dynamite or other high explosive just by capping it. I'm not even sure that a can of super coarse black powder would go high order if it was capped, unless that can was made of welded steel. The stuff ought to be just sprayed, a cap isn't strong enough or hot enough to set up the sort of shock and heat needed to detonate a compounded explosive.
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Believe it or not, it can and does happen. Had a Dignitary detail where we used dogs to check the Dignitaries Veh. The Dog hit and I searched the car. All I found was a belt holder containing 6 rounds of 38s that had fell down behind the seats.

The Secret Service swore the dogs wouldn't hit on bullets. I told them they would, The On Call ATF agent agreed with me. Still the SS switched cars.

I took a couple agents to our range, and demonstrate the setting off smokeless gun powder with blasting caps. I shot off three cans of WW 231 using blasting caps only.

One must understand there are several different sizes of blasting caps, some need busters.

As to black powder going HIGH ORDER. Black powder is a low explosive, it will never go high order, there is no benefit to using blasting caps or just time fuse an electric match.

Having said more then I should, PLEASE UNDESTAND I was a member of a Legit LE Bomb Squad. Experimenting with such can be considered by ATF as bomb making and could land you in hot water.
 
As I said earlier, I read that black powder can go high order, but only in quantities measured in tons and initiated by high nitro dynamite or TNT detonating. You'd need an enormous mass of powder in an open pit to behave enough like a fluid to conduct pressure waves successfully and provide enough inertia so the wave could be sustained by the explosive's own energy release. I'll try to find a reference.

All that is needed to set off any kind of explosive is the injection of enough kinetic energy to start breaking down the explosive into oxygen and fuel. That injected kinetic energy may be in the form of heat or in the form of a shock wave. Either form can cause that to happen.
 
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