Powder difference
The owner of Jack's and I are good friends. He is a Civil War reenactor and owns two cannons which is why he became a distributor. His powder is not repackaged by him as has been posted on this wire.
Goex packaged and made the runs of powder for him. It was intended to be for the reenactors and there was no need for the graphite coatings of regular sporting powders.
Graphite is added for two reasons, it makes the powder flow through powder measures and gives the powder a shiny look which looks nice. It does however slow the burn of the powder overall.
All black powder burns from the outside surface in and that is why you have faster speeds with 3F as opposed to 2F. Every lot of BP is the same when it starts out. It is made into huge round solid cakes. It then goes to the wheel mill for the making of the different grains. Less time gives us the larger grains such as FG and then you get 1F and so on until they arrive at 4F. There is no difference in the FG and 4F except in size and that is how we regulate the charge and it's power.
I see test all the time that compare Goex with Swiss, KIK, Diamonback, and so on.
First, all powders made in other countries is smaller in grain size than the Goex made in the USA.
Second, we no longer have a premium Goex but are left with the standard blend only. Hodgdon has saw fit to raise the price of Goex over 22% since buying the company. They also stopped making all the better powders.
A inside secret is that they fired employees with many years of service and cut all shifts to the bare minimum.
They are trying to stop the sporting powder business and have the huge government contracts that Goex has had for years.
The other powder companies make one top powder and don't have several blends as Goex once had.
The new Kik lot sold by Powder inc #3910 is a top performer and will give Swiss like results for so many rounds but will not shoot clean as long as Swiss before fouling out. It's a great powder to use and is only $10.50 a pound plus Haz-mat and shipping fees.
If shooting SASS matches then Diamondback will do fine but it's power ratio is lower than the others. Later David