Flake, vs ball, vs stick for barrel length or case capacity?

S

Shadow9mm

New member
Trying to do some learning, and i feel silly asking but i feel like i dont understand this well. I have only tried a handful of powders over the years. So im Sure there are many i have not seen.

Does powder shape have any relation to burn rate, or what barrel length it is suited to or is it case capacity.

Is ball powder better suited to shorter rifle barrels, like 16in-18? As in, due to the shape it builds a high pressure quickly and drops quicky as the surface area diminishes?

It seems to me from what i have seen, flake powders are generally reserved for handgun cartridges. However there are both ball and stick powders for handguns. Vv n350, aa#7, h110 come to mind.

Many of the 223 powders i have tried, cfe223, bl-c(2), h335 w748 come to mind are ball powders.

At the same time i have also used stick powders in 223 like benchmark, varget, and now bl-c(2).

And getting into 30-06 and 308 i have found stick powders to be more common. But have also found powders like big game that are spherical.

Am i missing something, is there any correlation. Is there a best use for a flake, ball, or stick. If there are all 3 for handgun, why not just use stick powders for everything if it is supposed to burn more consistently.... was there an evolution in powder shapes and we are still just using older technologies.... or are some better suited for certain uses....
 
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A couple of things. First stick powder burn rates are controlled by the grain geometry and formulation. The outside of the grains is coated with a deterrent so the flame has time to enter the perforations and start burning the grain from the inside out. The resulting growth in surface area as the flame burns outward, enlarging the wall area of the perforations, is what makes these powders progressive burning.

Spherical powder burn rate, however, is not controlled by grain geometry but has progressivity introduced by deterrent penetration of the grain surface. The concentration is very high on the outside, causing burning to start slowly, then the concentration drops off as the flame travels deeper into the grain, making it burn faster and faster. In this way, the rate of evolution of gas increases as it burns (progressivity) despite the grain surface area shrinking until final burnout. The drawback is the high deterrent concentration makes the powder harder to ignite in the slow powders. But it's not an issue with quick powders like 231 or Nitro 100 or Zip.

Barrel length matters surprisingly little to powder choice except that when a barrel is very short, a slow powder increases the amount of muzzle blast. But fast powders usually can't equal the velocity you get from a slow one without over-pressurizing the chamber. Down to about a foot of barrel length, you find rifle cartridge powders that produce the highest velocity in a long barrel also get the highest velocity in a shorter one.
 
Its the burn rate of the powder, and the pressure curve that produces that determines the most efficient case size/barrel length for that powder.

As Uncle Nick pointed out, stick powders use a combination of physical granule size and chemical deterrent to determine burn rate. Ball and flake powders use chemical deterrent composition to do the same.

There are powders of each physical type, stick, ball, and flake that are suitable for about every cartridge and pressure level. Some, of course are more suitable than others for a given application.
 
44 AMP said:
Its the burn rate of the powder, and the pressure curve that produces that determines the most efficient case size/barrel length for that powder.

As Uncle Nick pointed out, stick powders use a combination of physical granule size and chemical deterrent to determine burn rate. Ball and flake powders use chemical deterrent composition to do the same.

There are powders of each physical type, stick, ball, and flake that are suitable for about every cartridge and pressure level. Some, of course are more suitable than others for a given application.
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So was there an evolution in powder design, and we are adding technologies like retardants and granule engineering, to widen their ranges of application?

black powder was granular, and depending on the size of the granules it increased the surface area and thus burn rate. Flakes are wide and thin increasing the surface are. Stick seems similar to rocket motors looking at the ways they add the holes through the centers. Where did ball powders come from. Is there anywhere I can read up on the histories of powders and their evolution?
 
Buy a Hornady Manual and study the powder section. In my 50 years of loading, I never paid any attention to shape. I paid attention to what powder gave the best performance and accuracy for the cartridge I was loading.
 
GeauxTide said:
Buy a Hornady Manual and study the powder section. In my 50 years of loading, I never paid any attention to shape. I paid attention to what powder gave the best performance and accuracy for the cartridge I was loading.
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Yeah, I have one, I did that. It was not particularly enlightening other than to mention the French invented smokeless powder in the late 19th century.

Without testing every powder how is one supposed to know which gives the best performance or accuracy in a given individual gun. You have a limited ammount of data in a manual, whatever the maker decided to test, generally tested in a manner that is not analogous to real world shooting.

Im trying to understand, I guess, if certain granule designs have certain benefits in relation to powder curve to make them more or less suitable in certain applications and more importantly, if so, why...
 
So was there an evolution in powder design, and we are adding technologies like retardants and granule engineering, to widen their ranges of application?
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Smokeless powders have been the subject of evolution in design and manufacture since they were first invented.

Without testing every powder how is one supposed to know which gives the best performance or accuracy in a given individual gun.
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without testing IN YOUR GUN there is no way to be certain how well any given powder will perform. NO ONE can tell you what is the "most accurate" in YOUR GUN.

The closes anyone can come, and still be honest is to look at general trends over large numbers of firearms, and always be aware that YOUR GUN might be with the majority OR it could be at either end of the bell curve.

ONLY testing YOUR GUN will tell you what it actually does. Forget what "experts" say, other than as a starting point for your own, personal testing.

IF, for example someone states "match winners use this combination" ..its someplace to start, NOT a guarantee that combination will behave the same way in your rifle it does in match winner's guns.

If someone says "Blammo powder always gives the most accurate loads" they are, literally, talking out of their butt. IF they say "usually" instead of "always" its more realistic, and might possibly be closer to the truth.

Sorry there's no book, or Utube guru who can give you the answer you seek. There are many who THINK they can, but they are in error.

There are ALWAYS exceptions, and the only way to be sure your guns is, or isn't one of them is to test for yourself.
 
Ok, I'll bite. I also bought manuals from every bullet manufacturer, subscribed to Reloader Magazine, and Loaddata.com (307,000 loads). Beginning with Hornady IX, they published the powder(s) that gave the best performance on most cartridges.
 
In particular, Ball powder was developed in 1935 by Dr Fred Olsen at Western Cartridge Co. division of Olin Chemical. Which later procured Winchester, hence, Winchester Ball Powder.

The original intent was to reprocess obsolete and dangerously deteriorated WWI artillery and naval gun propellant. I don't know how much of that was actually done, but I doubt there was a lot.

But the Ball process has advantages even starting with fresh cellulosic material.
It is a lot faster, raw materials in, powder out in two days; in WWII DuPont was really hustling to get IMR extruded powder through in two weeks.
It is safer, the graining process is done under water and the powder is handled as a wet slurry though a good part of the plant.
 
I have been told that in commercial ammunition production,speed matters in number of rounds produced per day and cost per round.
Ball powder meters fast and with consistency.

I think maybe it has a drawback (in some cases) in that relying on deterrent alone can produce more fouling but I don't know enough to say much more.
 
So ball powder is faster to produce and easier to load? And stick can be better engineered, but is harder to produce and harder to load depending on the equipment used?
 
I'm not Unclenick. I don't know enough to give a good answer.

So ball powder is faster to produce and easier to load? And stick can be better engineered, but is harder to produce and harder to load depending on the equipment used?
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I would not argue against that. I suspect there is more to consider.
 
Early ball powders were noticeably more temperature sensitive than their IMR stick powder contemporaries.

Tweeks to the deterrent coating formula over the years have pretty much eliminated the issue. Powders (all types) still have a degree of temp sensitivity, but not like they once did.
 
Winchester StaBALL 6.5 was introduced as being the first ball powder to employ a temperature stabilizing approach. It also seems to be Hodgdon's top velocity producer for medium to heavy bullets in the 6.5 CM (and the 6.5×55 if you want to breathe more energy into the old Swedish Mauser round).

The problem with temperature stabilizing schemes, as with the Hodgdon Extreme line, for example, is they need to be tuned to load conditions. Varget, for example, is known to provide good temperature stability in 308W/7.62 NATO loads, but in 223R/5.56 NATO, it doesn't seem to do any better than a number of old familiar stick powders do. This Denton Bramwell article illustrates how limited the effect can be in another cartridge.

One thing I look at when selecting a powder is the fps/grain of the powder in published load data. That is, when I identify a range of prospective powders for a load, I look at the velocity difference for each one's maximum and starting loads and divide that difference by the charge weight difference for the two loads. Looking for the lowest number among those candidate powders provides the choice that is least sensitive to a charge weight error. Very often, as long as the load is not compressed, this will correlate to the choice that has the highest maximum load pressure listed in Hodgdon and Lyman data.


Shadow9mm,

Look at Dan Newberry's Optimum Charge Weight load concept. This is an approach to creating universal loads. They are a matter of powder, bullet, cartridge, and of course, charge weight all being in the right combination, and not just the choice of one of those elements. The idea was based on the fact some loads, like Federal's match GM308M, seem to shoot at least very well in a very large number of different guns with different barrel lengths. He wanted to figure out how you might go about identifying loads with such properties for other component combinations and chamberings.
 
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