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At the risk of :dead:
If you do the math that come out to 1.2 gallons of water/ton in 24 hours.

Some household dehumidifiers have a hard time pulling that much water out of the air in the same time period. :v
 
My experience matches yours, Spence. But....OH MY! Could we have been shooting soup all these years and just didn't know it???? :shocked2:

Like you, I've hunted in the rain and never even had my priming powder get the least bit damp. :thumbsup:
 
I've hunted in the rain and never even had my priming powder get the least bit damp.

Me neither, guess thats the advantage of a clean pan and a well made lock.
time...
glazing..
a cows knee.......................:yakyak:

Hey I go canoeing and never get wet..... :hmm:

Just because a compound is hygroscopic doesn't mean it will keep soaking up water like a roll of paper towels and turn into goo...everything has limits.
But I assume y'all know that and you're just having fun with me. :haha:
 
BP won't get funky but will clump up. I opened a keg of 45 year old DuPont powder to re-package it and I had to break it up with a pointy wooden stick into smaller chunks which I then broke up further with my hands. I've also seen it clump in horns. Back in the day, they periodically had to take barrels of powder from the magazines and pour it out on tarps and break up clumps and allow the sun to dry it out. Water was used in the manufacture of it and at one stage the damp powder was made into what was called presscake which was broken up before glazing and sizing.

By the way, I bought my first plastic can of GOEX recently. Noticed that GOEX no longer glazes nor puts graphite in their powder. No graphite is not a big deal. But glazing makes the powder flow much better.
 
hanshi said:
Actually it doesn't "break down" unless exposed to water, not dampness, but water. And still, NO, it is not hygroscopic; only the fouling is.

Not disagreeing but I have had priming powder turn to mud on a damp day but for the life of me I cannot remember if I cleaned it from the previous shot before priming. So maybe the fouling started the process.

Bob
 
hanshi said:
Like you, I've hunted in the rain and never even had my priming powder get the least bit damp. :thumbsup:
Looking back, I can say I've had a lot of fun and learned a lot of interesting stuff because of this marvelous hobby. Like the cat, curiosity was always my hook, and it lead me to strange places.

Back when, I got to wondering how reliable flintlocks were when conditions were't ideal. What if the attack came right at dawn, when you were asleep? Did they leave their guns primed all night? Would they fire straight off, no fiddling first? Had to check that out. At the time I was doing a lot of trekking using a homemade ground cloth and blanket as my bedroll. I just spread them out, climbed in and folded both over me. A warm but very damp way to sleep, wrapped up in a waterproof tarp. I figured a good test would be to prime my rifle and let it spend the night in my bed. I put it beside me, the muzzle toward my feet, and first thing in the morning I would uncover, sit up, pick up the gun and shoot it right from my bed. Did that a dozen times over a year or two, never had it fail to fire, not once. Nothing special was done to keep out the damp, not even on rainy nights, just laid my regular hunting gun down any old whichaway and shot a bad guy every morning before breakfast. Old damp prime works well enough that I can't tell the difference from fresh and dry.

Spence
 
Fantastic Spence,
your stories never disappoint.
I thought I was the only one that approached historical scenarios that way. :thumbsup: :hatsoff: :bow:
 
colorado clyde said:
Fantastic Spence,
your stories never disappoint.
I thought I was the only one that approached historical scenarios that way.
Nope, the greybeard crowd is always playing with things trying to prove the "go-no/go" of a lot of things done or not done. have slept with flintlocks too but not as a test...just spent the night with my lady...well, you know what I mean. She went BOOM first pull. I've spend many an hour in ground or tree stands in light drizzle and mist to pouring rain. Hard rain is almost impossible to deal with because of water's propensity to find it's way into anything and everything. It's possible but you have to give you hat to your lady if you want it to work...light sprinkles can be dealt with by 'huddling', tiny bead of lube around pan/frizzen base gap and (in my case) a roll of trade wool in the pan to absorb anything that gets by. Yes, it means you have to remove the wool roll and prime to shoot...but if you go 'slow as molasses in winter' it can be done...well, usually. Some Bambis are skittier than others! :wink: :v
 
colorado clyde said:
At the risk of :dead:
If you do the math that come out to 1.2 gallons of water/ton in 24 hours.

Some household dehumidifiers have a hard time pulling that much water out of the air in the same time period. :v

Umm... what? Dehumidification capacity is measured in pints per day. There are 8 pints in a gallon, and the weight of water is 8.345404 lbs per gallon.

Therefore:
(1 gallon per 8 pints) X (8.345404 lbs per 1 gallon) = 1.04317550000 lbs per pint

And there are 7000 grains per lb. According to the test results, the BP gained 0.5 gr of water weight pulled from the air in one day, so:
0.5 gr X (1 lb per 7000 gr) =0.00007142857 lbs of water weight gain.

So if you divide the weight of the water pulled from the air by the weight of a pint of water, you get the number of pints pulled out of the air, or 0.00006847225 pints of water absorbed by the test BP in 1 day, according to the reported test results.

Most household dehumidifiers have capacities between 25 and 70 pints per day, making even the lowest-capacity units more than 365 thousand times better than the BP in this test. Comparing the water-removal capacity of BP to household dehumidifiers may be valid, if the household unit was unplugged.

By the test results, BP is proven to be hygroscopic. But, negligibly AT BEST (even at higher relative humidities, IMHO).
 
At the risk of
If you do the math that come out to 1.2 gallons of water/ton in 24 hours.

Some household dehumidifiers have a hard time pulling that much water out of the air in the same time period.


How is your reading comprehension?
First off!
I was making an analogy to better visualize how hygroscopic BP is.
Gallons of water/ton = gallons of water per ton of black powder.
Imagine two rooms; one filled with a ton of BP.
The other room has your run of the mill Wal-Mart dehumidifier in it.
We will assume that Britmoothys test was done on a humid day.
The black powder should absorb about as much moisture respectively, as what the dehumidifier will actually produce.
I have spent many years using a small household dehumidifier and have never seen one capable of producing 8+ gallons of water a day.

Let me know when you figure out the rest of your math mistakes :rotf:
 
I have seen Pyrodex go bad in under a year in opened cans. No idea why. So have my friends in the sport. Unopened have been fine.

Don't know why just our experience. NOTE I do not us substitutes any more for the last 20+ years maybe the formula is now better?
 
Not yet Hanshi,
but trying to figure out this simple math mistake
will give a lot of people a headache.
Umm... what? Dehumidification capacity is measured in pints per day. There are 8 pints in a gallon, and the weight of water is 8.345404 lbs per gallon.

Therefore:
(1 gallon per 8 pints) X (8.345404 lbs per 1 gallon) = 1.04317550000 lbs per pint

And there are 7000 grains per lb. According to the test results, the BP gained 0.5 gr of water weight pulled from the air in one day, so:
0.5 gr X (1 lb per 7000 gr) =0.00007142857 lbs of water weight gain.

So if you divide the weight of the water pulled from the air by the weight of a pint of water, you get the number of pints pulled out of the air, or 0.00006847225 pints of water absorbed by the test BP in 1 day, according to the reported test results.

:rotf: :rotf:
 
I worked on an archaeological dig with my uncle at Ft. Boykin in Virginia many years ago. Our main excavation was the well which had been filled in when the fort was abandoned near the end of the civil war.

We recovered a lot of 32 pound cannonballs that still had their wooden fuze plugs and powder in place.We took out some of the powder that had been wet for over 130 years, and after drying it we lit some up and it burned as good as the day it was made.
 
Ok! here's a clue to the math problem.
compare these two statements:

Ok men, results are in! A 100grn of fresh powder left out all night in the shed covered with paper and in the scales pan it was weighed in has gained.......drum roll........
1/2 a grain! It now weighs 100&1/2grains!

And there are 7000 grains per lb. According to the test results, the BP gained 0.5 gr of water weight pulled from the air in one day, so:
0.5 gr X (1 lb per 7000 gr) =0.00007142857 lbs of water weight gain.

Now please tell me I'm not the only one that can see the mistake. :shocked2:

It's all gibberish.
 
colorado clyde said:
At the risk of
If you do the math that come out to 1.2 gallons of water/ton in 24 hours.

Some household dehumidifiers have a hard time pulling that much water out of the air in the same time period.


How is your reading comprehension?
First off!
I was making an analogy to better visualize how hygroscopic BP is.
Gallons of water/ton = gallons of water per ton of black powder.
Imagine two rooms; one filled with a ton of BP.
The other room has your run of the mill Wal-Mart dehumidifier in it.
We will assume that Britmoothys test was done on a humid day.
The black powder should absorb about as much moisture respectively, as what the dehumidifier will actually produce.
I have spent many years using a small household dehumidifier and have never seen one capable of producing 8+ gallons of water a day.

Let me know when you figure out the rest of your math mistakes :rotf:

My reading comprehension is fine, as you will see, and I will show you the mistake of your math: you've assumed that the relationship of the weight of the water removed from the air and the total weight of the desiccant (in this case, the black powder), is linear. You did a direct proportion of 0.5:100 = x:2000, with x equating to 10 lbs of water. Then, you simply converted 10 lbs into gallons using 8.345404 lbs/gal, to come up with your result of 1.2 gals of water removed from the air using 2000 lbs of black powder. My reading comprehension is pretty solid.

Strictly for the sake of argument, let's agree that the relationship is, in fact, linear and that your extrapolation is valid.

The black powder should absorb about as much moisture respectively, as what the dehumidifier will actually produce.

I completely agree with this statement, however, you cannot simply compare your derived amount of extracted water (1.2 gal/day) to that of your many years' experience with dehumidifiers. Sorry, friend, we need something a bit more empirical than that, such as a known extraction rating for such units. You are saying as if it were always the case, that a ton of BP in a room on a high-humidity day WILL IN FACT extract 1.2 gallons of water over the course of 24 hours, while maintaining that a standard dehumidifier of unknown capacity rating may struggle to remove that much water from the air over the same time frame, strictly by your experience.

Please understand here, that this is extremely simplified for the sake of argument concerning your original premise, that the BP is a better remover of water in air than a commercial dehumidifier.

Again, for the sake of argument, let's assume that your 1.2gal per ton of BP per day result is 100% valid, no questions asked. In your room with 1 ton of BP, we also MUST assume that the surrounding air in the room is so humid that it contains at least 1.2 gallons of water vapor. BUT, we also have to agree that the room with the Wal-Mart dehumidifier also has at least 1.2 gallons of water in the air, fair enough?

So by your assertion, BP has a capacity of 1.2 gallons of water removal per day, which equates to 9.6 pints of water removal per day. And the lowest-capacity Wal-Mart unit is rated at 25 pints per day. Hmm... And, since you're a fan of linearity in complex environments, let's assume linearity of water removal rates: 0.4 pints per hour (9.6 pints per 24 hours) for the 2000 lbs of black powder desiccant, and 1.042 pints per hour (25 pints per 24 hours) for the Wal-Mart unit. That means that while it takes the 24 hour period for the BP desiccant to remove 9.6 pints of water, it takes the Wal-Mart unit 9:12:58 (h:mm:ss) to remove the same amount of water. That doesn't sound like "struggling" to me. Obviously, the higher-capacity units will do this even faster.

I have spent many years using a small household dehumidifier and have never seen one capable of producing 8+ gallons of water a day.

You mean the 70 pint/day model? Check your model's capacity. If you're unit is installed in an area of consistent high relative humidity (consistent being the key word here) you would be dumping the capacity of the unit every day.

The pesky reality with those doggone dehumidifiers is that they actually do what they are designed to do. With the highest rated units, you never empty 8.75 gallons of water after the end of a 24 hour period (starting from empty) SIMPLY because there is not that much water vapor in the room. If you did, the water that you're unit is removing from the room is being replaced at the same or higher rate, indicating a huge high-humidity air inlet. After all, what good is a dehumidifier if it doesn't reduce the relative humidity in the room?

Now you do realize that the main factor here (among many others) is the fact that the surface area of the desiccant that is exposed to the humid atmosphere would have more impact upon its efficacy than its its weight, so the direct-proportion linear weight removed:total weight relationship that you used to derive your water removal rate is questionable, at best. Only a ton of black powder exposed to sauna-like relative humidity levels would prove your hypothesized value out. As they say, one test is worth a thousand opinions. That being said, I would bet my best flintlock rifle that the capacity of 1 ton of BP would come back MUCH LESS than 9.6 pints per day.

I know that this is way :eek:ff , but thanks for playing!
:haha:
 

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