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4F Black Powder Question

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If you "hear" or are "told" that bubba's younger cousin was maimed when his SW .357 blew up cuz he used the primers in the blue box (that clearly we all know will blow up a SW .357) would you stop loading them....even though they are not listed as a "dont use" in any of the 36 reloading manuels you have and provide a much tighter group than the ones in the red box???

BTW nobody adds the fact that bubba was still holding his own beer when he fired that shot that dang near blew him up?? Actually some say bubba fell off his riding mower and maimed his hand when he reached for his zippo with the 28 point buck on it??? what ever. I for one am NEVER USING THE BLUE BOX PRIMERS WHEN I RELOAD MY SW .357. AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU But, I of course dont care if ya do.

I wonder if it was a John Deer that maimed his hand? Or maybe he primed with some smokeless to make sure the 4f went off cux he dropped his horn in the crik when the catfish was bout to get loose??? Either way we should all stop mowing the lawn and reloading (with the primers in the blue box anyways).
 
Emotion vs. logic, the never ending battle.

Will this go to 20 or to 25 pages??
 
Zonie said:
Actually, Mad Monk (William Knight) is one of the foremost authorities on black powder in the world. He's spent his life working with it, testing it and advising major black powder companies around the world about the best ways to manufacture black powder.

I am somewhat surprised that TNGhost has never heard of him.
Click to expand...

William Knight? Of unmentionable Knight Rifles?

So a foremost authority and adviser to major black powder companies is accusing them of nefarious business practices, selling floor sweepings as 4f?

Interesting. Curious as to why he would post that in a forum?

I wonder what they are putting in their 3f, 2f and 1f that we don't know about?
 
He was the Research Director for one of the biggest Black Powder factories in the world, Composition Researcher and Special Advisor of Composition for Goex, Wano, and Elephant, he's a published and noted expert in the composition of BP. He advised the US Military after unexpected barrel failures in howitzers, etc. He's the real deal. He's probably the guy who wrote all the data the manufacturers publish on uses of BP granulation. Anyway, worst case, his thoughts are at least as valid as any of ours.....
 
[/QUOTE]
MtnMan said:
I've asked the question and if I got an answer I don't remember it. I'll ask again.

What advantages does 4F give you as the main charge?
Click to expand...
I tried to answer in an earlier post why and how I used 4F and you eloquently responded
MtnMan said:
SASS isn't hunting and a C&B revolver is not a flintlock. You changed the pan powder every 30 min. No way would 4F as a main charge not suck some moisture.

I don't care what you guys do. If you want to use 4F as a main charge. Go ahead. I'll stay with 3F and if it's snowing it will be 2F.

What a silly thread. Not sure why I got in it. We need a delete post button.
Click to expand...
Every gun is different. People like options. Whether it be for target shooting, plinking or hunting. As you go through life you come upon many doors. Close those doors or refuse to open them and you will never find out what’s on the other side.
 
Bob McBride said:
He was the Research Director for one of the biggest Black Powder factories in the world, Composition Researcher and Special Advisor of Composition for Goex, Wano, and Elephant, he's a published and noted expert in the composition of BP. He advised the US Military after unexpected barrel failures in howitzers, etc. He's the real deal. He's probably the guy who wrote all the data the manufacturers publish on uses of BP granulation. Anyway, worst case, his thoughts are at least as valid as any of ours.....
Click to expand...
He has some interesting thoughts on Pyrodex corrosiveness along with Pyrodox and Triple 7 development.
 
Bob McBride said:
He was the Research Director for one of the biggest Black Powder factories in the world, Composition Researcher and Special Advisor of Composition for Goex, Wano, and Elephant, he's a published and noted expert in the composition of BP. He advised the US Military after unexpected barrel failures in howitzers, etc. He's the real deal. He's probably the guy who wrote all the data the manufacturers publish on uses of BP granulation. Anyway, worst case, his thoughts are at least as valid as any of ours.....
Click to expand...

OK, if that is true and this "mad monk" is the William Knight you speak of, it raises some questions.

If that was the case then you would think he had access to reams of black powder data and would not be relating a series of graphs related to "pressure bombs" he got second hand from a retired military colonel and not what he would have had to have possessed on his own?

Also if that was the case and he worked at a large black powder manufacturer, why would he take "his can" of 4f into a laboratory testing PVC resins where he said he worked and use screens designed for PVC to experiment with his 4f?

And finally if he truly worked for and provided consul to major powder companies, why would he, under a screen name, accuse them of nefarious business practices in selling floor sweepings as 4f?

That whole post that was quoted by MtnMan is full of contradictions and senseless statements. Not to mention there is no link or reference.

Even then "mad monk" does not state a 4f main charge is dangerous, only that a mislabled can of floor sweepings could be dangerous and sums his statement up with the fact 4f is bad is because its hard to clean up. Really?
 
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TNGhost said:
OK, if that is true and this "mad monk" is the William Knight you speak of, it raises some questions.

If that was the case then you would think he had access to reams of black powder data and would not be relating a series of graphs related to "pressure bombs" he got second hand from a retired military colonel and not what he would have had to have possessed on his own?

Also if that was the case and he worked at a large black powder manufacturer, why would he take "his can" of 4f into a laboratory testing PVC resins where he said he worked and use screens designed for PVC to experiment with his 4f?

And finally if he truly worked for and provided consul to major powder companies, why would he, under a screen name, accuse them of nefarious business practices in selling floor sweepings as 4f?

That whole post that was quoted by MtnMan is full of contradictions and senseless statements. Not to mention there is no link or reference.

Even then "mad monk" does not state a 4f main charge is dangerous, only that a mislabled can of floor sweepings could be dangerous and sums his statement up with the fact 4f is bad is because its hard to clean up. Really?
Click to expand...

Easy. No dog in the fight here. I don't know if Bill is that Bill Knight or not, I never really talked to him on any of that. I know him as 'Mad Monk' and that he was the Research Director at the S/A Pernambuco Powder Factory in Brazil among many other research type BP related jobs. Early in his career he was a PVC engineer of some description but he was testing BP compounds for manufacturers even back then as he had his own lab. Like I said above, I never said 4f wasn't safe to use as you describe, I just confirmed who Mad Monk was, bona fide wise. The post of his above was pulled from a related thread elsewhere and posted here so he's not answering the pertinent question in this conversation specifically. He's also now something around 80 years old.
 
Last edited:
Here's a post from Bill. He's not well and maybe some things won't make sense to you. However, he doesn't deserve to be ragged on when you don't know who he is. I really don't care about 4F and i'm surprised I got involved.

Here's Bill.
At present I am 78 years old and visit the local hospital twice a week for blood platelet transfusions and blood transfusions. The result of a bunch of years in chemical plants. The monomer I worked with in polymerizing synthetic rubber took 40 years to effect me. In 2017 I suffered total bone marrow failure. With the medical problem I no longer get in debates with what are little more than arm chair experts.
In 1980 the PVC plant I worked in put me in a laboratory all by myself in a little back water pilot plant operation. Proved to be a god send. That gave me a total of 13 years in a lab all by myself. In my spare time I worked on black powder. I was a senior research technician and process engineer (non-degree). My total time in lab work in the manufacture of organic textile and paper dyes and synthetic polymers was 37 years.
I got into looking deep into black powder because what I was looking at in powder performance in the field in my flintlocks did not match what I was seeing in historical writings. Black powder is compounded from 3 ingredients. No real chemistry involved. Almost all physical properties that govern how the powder performs in a gun. Ended up with a huge library here of powder papers dating back into the mid-1800s. With one machine in the lab I could take a powder sample apart and look at the particle size of both the charcoal and sulfur. That data would tell me what type of powder it had originally been manufactured as. I did a lot of work on what ingredient purity did in the finished powder and what impure ingredients could do in the powder and in the gun.
There was a gun running the Hagley Museum And Library, the old original du Pont BP plant, that described me as the only one who did any PRACTICAL research into black powder in the 1900s.
From 1993 until 2001 I was the research director for the S/A Pernambuco Powder Factory in Brazil that produced the Elephant brand black powder. In 2005 GOEX approached me to look at their then new special bp cartridge powder and the bp sub they purchased to replace the defunct sugar based clear shot powder. I checked shipments of the Swiss powder for the U.S. importer. Then when Elephant folded I coached WANO, in Germany, in how to make a bp best suited to the U.S. market. That would be the Schuetzen brand black powder. I was offered an all expense paid 6 months in China to work in a bp plant near Wuxi in China. I passed on that one. I had a pretty good knowledge in what is required in the way of black powder used as an intermediate primer in large caliber artillery. They wanted to pick my brain on that one and I was not about to get into that.
When the Swiss made the first run of the Nul B for flintlock pan powder I was sent a sample before it came onto the U.S. market. Then my findings would determin how much they would initially produce for the U.S. market. When other foreign bp producers wanted into the U.S. market back in the 1990s I would be sent samples to test to see if it would sell in the U.S. and at what price to the shooter. There were a bunch of foreign producers who were going bankrupt and the U.S. bp market was looked upon as the golden egg.

I wrote a number of guides to the various brands on the market around 2000. And one bigger one on the basic technology of bp manufacture. When I first got into looking into the black powder I found that not one of the producers had any real understand of what was going on in the powder during the production process. They knew that if they did things certain ways they would get a certain "quality" of powder. But if they ran into having to change raw material suppliers they went into panic mode. If something went wrong in the processing they had no idea of what happened in the process. Technically they were in over their heads as far as understanding went. But then in the PVC plant I dealt with that almost daily.

But for years I have had the arm chair experts tell me I did not know what I was talking about. And a lot of them have utterly no idea as to just how much lot to lot to lot variability is seen in some brands of black powder during certain periods of production.

I was also the guy who discovered that certain types of bacteria will eat portions of the black powder during storage. My publication on that opened a new field to companies cleaning up military cites where there was ground contamination from explosive residue. A U.S. military research group used me when they had problems with 155mm howitzer blow ups in the 1970s. And catastrophic breech failures in the automatic 6 and 7 inch gun mounts that Navy was working on during the 1970s and 1980s.

When the Navy had the 16" gun blow up on the Iowa I was the gun who filled Sam Nunn in on the fact that the Navy investigators were way off base when they claimed it was the result/actions of a spurned gay sailor in the turret. The Navy investigators claimed an improvised ignition device consisting of bleach and steel wool was placed in the loading before seating the charge and closing the breech. Loading ram pressure then causing the to to reach and generate heat which then ignited the bags of smokeless in the bore. They claim this upon finding iron and chloride in the bore. I pointed out that this were contaminates in the GOEX black powder being used in the gun's initial primer system and would be found in any large caliber military gun at the time post firing of the gun. So based on that he shifted the investigation over to the Sandia Lab.
 
Bob McBride said:
Easy. No dog in the fight here. I don't know if Bill is that Bill Knight or not, I never really talked to him on any of that. I know him as 'Mad Monk' and that he was the Research Director at the S/A Pernambuco Powder Factory in Brazil among many other research type BP related jobs. Early in his career he was a PVC engineer but he was testing BP compounds for manufacturers even back then as he had his own lab. Like I said above, I never said 4f wasn't safe to use as you describe, I just confirmed who Mad Monk was, bona fide wise. He's also now something around 80 years old.
Click to expand...

Didn't mean to imply you were advocating the "dangerous" angle , we had that conversation earlier and I agree with your assessments.

What I was trying to do is track down and verify this "forum post" referenced by MtnMan, and it would seem from the information you have provided that this was a statement made early in Knight's career, before he was employed at a powder company or was advising them.

Given his age, that would kind of preclude it being an internet post, and would certainly preclude it being any kind of up to date information. That he worked for a competitor, or may have been trying to gain a position with that Brazilian based competitor would explain the accusation of nefarious practices by GOEX/Dupont.

Still amounts to simply a red herring provided by the 4faphobes in regards the ongoing discussion here.
 
TNGhost said:
Go ahead keep trying to shout down logic and evidence with your emotional feelings, 'tis the order of the day.
Click to expand...

Is a catastrophic failure necessary to adopt a rationale for not using 4f ?

I poured it in my flintlock and it flowed right out the vent hole. If enough flows out without resetting the ball you are left with a ball off the powder charge situation.
 
Carbon 6 said:
Is a catastrophic failure necessary to adopt a rationale for not using 4f ?

I poured it in my flintlock and it flowed right out the vent hole. If enough flows out without resetting the ball you are left with a ball off the powder charge situation.
Click to expand...

A good man knows his limitations Carbon 6, and you're a good man.
 
TNGhost said:
Care to provide any proof whatsoever of that?
Click to expand...

I just gave one example, I'll give you another.

I once blew the nipple off a gun using 4 ffff, In all fairness though, it probably could have happened with 3fff too.
 
MtnMan said:
Here's a post from Bill. He's not well and maybe some things won't make sense to you. However, he doesn't deserve to be ragged on when you don't know who he is. I really don't care about 4F and i'm surprised I got involved.

Here's Bill.
At present I am 78 years old and visit the local hospital twice a week for blood platelet transfusions and blood transfusions. The result of a bunch of years in chemical plants. The monomer I worked with in polymerizing synthetic rubber took 40 years to effect me. In 2017 I suffered total bone marrow failure. With the medical problem I no longer get in debates with what are little more than arm chair experts.
In 1980 the PVC plant I worked in put me in a laboratory all by myself in a little back water pilot plant operation. Proved to be a god send. That gave me a total of 13 years in a lab all by myself. In my spare time I worked on black powder. I was a senior research technician and process engineer (non-degree). My total time in lab work in the manufacture of organic textile and paper dyes and synthetic polymers was 37 years.
I got into looking deep into black powder because what I was looking at in powder performance in the field in my flintlocks did not match what I was seeing in historical writings. Black powder is compounded from 3 ingredients. No real chemistry involved. Almost all physical properties that govern how the powder performs in a gun. Ended up with a huge library here of powder papers dating back into the mid-1800s. With one machine in the lab I could take a powder sample apart and look at the particle size of both the charcoal and sulfur. That data would tell me what type of powder it had originally been manufactured as. I did a lot of work on what ingredient purity did in the finished powder and what impure ingredients could do in the powder and in the gun.
There was a gun running the Hagley Museum And Library, the old original du Pont BP plant, that described me as the only one who did any PRACTICAL research into black powder in the 1900s.
From 1993 until 2001 I was the research director for the S/A Pernambuco Powder Factory in Brazil that produced the Elephant brand black powder. In 2005 GOEX approached me to look at their then new special bp cartridge powder and the bp sub they purchased to replace the defunct sugar based clear shot powder. I checked shipments of the Swiss powder for the U.S. importer. Then when Elephant folded I coached WANO, in Germany, in how to make a bp best suited to the U.S. market. That would be the Schuetzen brand black powder. I was offered an all expense paid 6 months in China to work in a bp plant near Wuxi in China. I passed on that one. I had a pretty good knowledge in what is required in the way of black powder used as an intermediate primer in large caliber artillery. They wanted to pick my brain on that one and I was not about to get into that.
When the Swiss made the first run of the Nul B for flintlock pan powder I was sent a sample before it came onto the U.S. market. Then my findings would determin how much they would initially produce for the U.S. market. When other foreign bp producers wanted into the U.S. market back in the 1990s I would be sent samples to test to see if it would sell in the U.S. and at what price to the shooter. There were a bunch of foreign producers who were going bankrupt and the U.S. bp market was looked upon as the golden egg.

I wrote a number of guides to the various brands on the market around 2000. And one bigger one on the basic technology of bp manufacture. When I first got into looking into the black powder I found that not one of the producers had any real understand of what was going on in the powder during the production process. They knew that if they did things certain ways they would get a certain "quality" of powder. But if they ran into having to change raw material suppliers they went into panic mode. If something went wrong in the processing they had no idea of what happened in the process. Technically they were in over their heads as far as understanding went. But then in the PVC plant I dealt with that almost daily.

But for years I have had the arm chair experts tell me I did not know what I was talking about. And a lot of them have utterly no idea as to just how much lot to lot to lot variability is seen in some brands of black powder during certain periods of production.

I was also the guy who discovered that certain types of bacteria will eat portions of the black powder during storage. My publication on that opened a new field to companies cleaning up military cites where there was ground contamination from explosive residue. A U.S. military research group used me when they had problems with 155mm howitzer blow ups in the 1970s. And catastrophic breech failures in the automatic 6 and 7 inch gun mounts that Navy was working on during the 1970s and 1980s.

When the Navy had the 16" gun blow up on the Iowa I was the gun who filled Sam Nunn in on the fact that the Navy investigators were way off base when they claimed it was the result/actions of a spurned gay sailor in the turret. The Navy investigators claimed an improvised ignition device consisting of bleach and steel wool was placed in the loading before seating the charge and closing the breech. Loading ram pressure then causing the to to reach and generate heat which then ignited the bags of smokeless in the bore. They claim this upon finding iron and chloride in the bore. I pointed out that this were contaminates in the GOEX black powder being used in the gun's initial primer system and would be found in any large caliber military gun at the time post firing of the gun. So based on that he shifted the investigation over to the Sandia Lab.
Click to expand...

Nice post, the man made some great contributions to black powder. A bit off topic as I see no reference to the fact that 4f as a main charge is dangerous.

Nice try too, at changing the subject. and your sympathy play your intro added a nice touch as well.
 
Last edited:
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