Light Load Explosion and black powder.

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breadbasketbomb

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The rarely believed, or even noticed phenomenon of Light Loads exploding. A topic that hasn't been explored because if you want light recoil, you normally just use a cartridge with a smaller round. Or Trailboss. A common cause of case rupture, and/or the destruction of the firearm is double charges, wrong powder, improper seating, etc. The need for a bigger bang leading to a bigger bang than one would anticipate. No one would really cut the loads in half for that big bang, and low recoil loads in normally higher recoiling weapons have been done to some success. So really, who cares?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTfEDaWMj4o

Being a person into science fiction, trying to create a plausible world means I have to have a basis. And no, I will not make a light load- and for a time I wasn't really interested in them. They seemed inefficient. But my interest was piqued when I saw a little snippet from a documentary on the Mughal Empire, particularly their matchlocks. In it claimed that the matchlocks had a specially shaped powder chamber, one that was cavernous and filled only halfway with black powder and then padded with, for some reason, animal dung. It had a throat, or neck, which prevented the projectile from falling all the way through, leaving that empty space. The claim was that the added oxygen increased the power. I call BS because the powder already has that oxygen. So to me, it has to be an exploitation of a certain mechanism, in this case (no pun intended) low density causing high pressure spikes in order to amplify the power of the given powder load.

Could intentionally underloading a cartridge without seating the bullet against the powder, therefore having large amounts of empty space, be used to give black powder a higher chamber pressure?

And also, in an industrial sense, is Black Powder easier to produce than smokeless powder? Is weaker, less nitrated, and slower burning smokeless powder cheaper than the modern propellants used in the 5.56 or 7.62.
 
Black powder is very easy to make. three minerals are ground to dust, mixed with gum, formed into granules and dried. The process for even the simplest smokeless powders require lots of chemical and then physical processes. A double based powder requires not only the production of the base nitrocellulose, but it also requires the manufacture and addition of nitroglycerine. These processes are far more diffcult and advanced than the simple mixing of powders to makeb black.

I don't know what to make of that video. Please keep in mind that all throughout history there has been a whole lot of BS invented by people that became accepted truth. Someone may have created that crazy process of small chamber load of black powder and elephant poop, and it just stuck for some reason.

I, however, am going to throw the bull- poop flag. That guy put a tiny little powdr charge down the barrel, I'm going to throw out a guess of less than thirty, to throw a massive bullet that looked like it was larger than a fifty caliber ball. I am not convinced that the actual rifles during real combat were packed with a loose fiber wad. the practice of packing a safari rifle with a charge that didn't fill the case and wads or farina to compress the powder and hold it in a solid mass isn't the same as using poop on black powder. BP ignites so easily that just a small mass laying loose in that chamber will ignite easily, unless it is soaking wet, and even then, packing it with fiber might not help.

I don't like that video. It seems a little sketchy to me. The history channel also ran a documentary showing how the indians would make a sheet of steel and sell it. What they showed appeared to be utter nonsense.

Just to take a little perspective, these guys aren't experts at any thing, they go around and take pictures and ask people questions. fact checking is poor. In another documentary, I don't recall the subject, they referred to the "horse pistol" and described its purpose as being killing a persons horse, rather than shooting at the rider. It was a big bore heavy charge gun meant strictly for combat against big animals.

You can look around and find that a hors pistol has nothing to do with that. The horse pistol was a huge, heavy gun meant to kill anything, but the key to the phrase is that it was hung on your horse, not your belt or a holster. It was strapped to the harness on the strong side, to fire in case of emergency at whatever the threat was, wheither it was a bear, a boar, or a highwayman.

the long passage about how hard it was for the guy with the matchlock to work was BS, as well. The flintlock was the primary weapon, and it worked. People fired and charged. The people who used matchlocks weren't front line troops, they fired several times as others engaged in bladed compat. This wasn't the civil war, in which everyone had a musket, and the entire battle would be fought between men with guns in some cases.

These things are turned out by the thousands at every one of those shops and sold as either tourist novelties or shipped overseas and sold by retailers as reproduction pieces.

keep in mind as well that the matchlock was used in dozens of countries and regions, even the us in the colonial times, and I doubt that any of those rifles used jug chambers. As far as cleaning, wth? how would a recessed jug facilitate cleaning? it would leave an inaccessible space filled with powder residue and packing material.
 
another thing I'd like to touch on, don't all of the really modern rifle cartridges have bottlenecks and hence chambers that fit that same description?

as soon as we had a chance, we dumped the musket, started using brass cartridges, and when the BP cartridge rifle became more advanced, we dumped the pistol cartridge BP rounds and started with the hyphenated BP bottlenecks.

thirty grains in a bottle necked cartridge of smaller bore size was believed to work better than for example a 44-40. So, maybe there was something to the idea. Rather than packing a load of powder straight down the barrel, which will not always burn completely before the ball is ejected and the powder just sprayed out the barrel, maybe the jug allowed for more efficient burning by confining the powder closer to the point of ignition, and allowed a heavier load of powder that would in theory increase bullet energy.

The bottle necked 44-77 was far more deadly than the straight walled 45*70, as it carried over a ten percent increase in powder charge, a heavier bullet in some standard rounds, and a narrower bullet with higher sectional density. This point may be incorrect, or argued at least, but that's how i interpret the ballistics.
 
To be honest, I do think that they're quite clueless. Though I think it's clueless in the sense they're coming across intelligent but outdated designs. It's possible, but I can't say.

In retrospect, designing a cartridge that would make use of the theoretical detonation of light loads would be impractical. Bulky, complex. But I am thinking of other technologies. And really, there is allot of gunpowder designs. The most advanced ed I could think of is the powder used in the early british .303, firing round nosed 215 grain bullet at 2000 fps. The chamber pressure was claimed to be close to 40000 psi, which is impressive for black powder. The powder was described as being in the form of small capsule shaped pellets with holes bored into them.

Would that be more cost effective?
 
I am completely unaware of that. It might have worked by dropping the pellet into the case before forming the neck. Use of a pellet could result in a more progressive burn, the thing we all strive for. The reason we pack black down tightly is to help the combustion to proceed at least a bit more slowly than if it was just tossed in loose and ignited all at once when the cap goes off.

It's been centuries of progress, and just in the last century or so we've gone from straight walled bpd rounds that ranged op to black powder express rifles for dangerous game to super magnums in thirty caliber. The incredible innovations of the last century have maybe reached the peak.

James Howe wrote that he had achieved 5,000 fps in a rifle. He thought that it would be available to the public in a few years.
 
Some years ago, I was worried about light loads with smokeless powder. The apparent danger was that of the propellant detonating rather than just burning as it is supposed to do. Having worked with high explosives in the past the idea of detonation and the damage it can cause did worry me. There were some references to the problem, but nothing definite that I could find -- other than just warning. I still would like to see something specific if anyone knows about the problem.
willr
 
Somebody once posted a paragraph explaining that detonation is possible, because the powder itself undergoes physical changes when heated and hammered into a pellet by the initial primer firing and partially igniting. The burning stops, the powder is smashed into a homogeneous chunk that is capable of detonation. It all takes place nearly instantaneously.

Explosive therapy, so to speak, is being researched for creating weird things, such as welding sheets of metal together. It's an important area of study.

I don't know that it is true. I know that these chemicals are are capable of doing unexpected things under unusual circumstances. I'm not knowledgeable enough to disagree with him, but imo, the actual threat of the low charge "detonation" is really small, whereas a squib or accidental overcharge by doubling can and do happen routinely. So I just don't don't think that it's a good idea to experiment with things sometimes.
 
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