concussion ignition?

[Rifleman1776]

Yesterday I found a 1973 edition of the Lyman cast bullet loading manual. It has a large section on muzzle loading as well with reccomened charges, etc.
The preface to this section has several errors and misstatements.
One said bp can be ignited with static sparks. That has proven false many times.
It also said bp can be ignited with concussion. e.g. pounding with a hammer or something non metallic.
I know, in centuries past, I read about this but have forgotten what was said. A couple of my dying brain cells are trying to tell me that is false. It requires heat (flint spark or cap) to ignite. I'm not anxious to test this issue. :shocked2: Any input here?

 

[crockett]

Well never say never. I have never mentioned this before but I have often wondered if the chain firing that occurs in a revolver is a result of concussion of some sort. I've heard of the rare event of the force of a ramrod causing friction (ember?) that ignited the charge.
Trouble is...all just "supposes" how can these rare events be documented or examined? (I have no idea)

 

[Britsmoothy]

Waste of time brother.

B :thumbsup:

 

[zimmerstutzen]

powder can be ignited by static electricity. I have seen a water pumping station fried by static electricity. metal valves fused, glass melted etc. It can't be ignited by the usual wool socks on a winter day static. Lightning is static electricity and the heat that goes with such a lightning bolt is above the flash point for powder. I suspect it is not the spark itself, but when the spark generates sufficient heat that the powder can be touched off. The powder itself under normal chemical formulation is not very conductive.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

Another thing to possibly consider is that modern powder has a graphite coating on the powder granules. Graphite is a pretty poor conductor, so that may reduce the chance of ignition by static electricity :idunno:

 

[Steve Rosen]

seems to me that concussive ignition is what made the toy "cap guns" of my youth work...

 

[Rifleman1776]

seems to me that concussive ignition is what made the toy "cap guns" of my youth work...

No. :shake: Those had other ingrediants much like perc caps and modern cartridge primers. And, they were dangerous things. Fun though. :wink:

 

[Stumpkiller]

I'm sure you could come up with a situation where concussion "seemed" to ignite the powder. Put it in a cylinder and drive a tight fitting piston down on it and the increased pressure will lower the ignition point - that's how you get a model airplane to run on alcohol fuel without an ignition system. But you have to either have a catalyst or some spark or heat source for ignition.

So if you pushed a tight fitting ram-rod and patched ball down the bore at 11,000 miles per hour . . . maybe.

With a hammer I'm not sure what the pressure at impact is. Conceivably the powder in the center can't spread out fast enough so the pressure goes up

I don't think I'm going to take a can of FFFg and a sledge hammer to experiment; however. You can get a spark from smacking rocks together, and concrete has lots of tiny rocks in the matrix. So if you poured blackpowder out on concrete and hit it almighty hard. Maybe?

 

[Claude Mathis]

powder can be ignited by static electricity.

http://www.ctmuzzleloaders.com/ctml_experiments/sparks/sparks.html

 

[BrownBear]

I'm sure you could come up with a situation where concussion "seemed" to ignite the powder.

Grant me that the powder in plain old firecrackers is black powder, and it's easy to do. A trick learned by kids and passed from generation to generation:

Some of the firecrackers have fuse failures and don't go off. Tear them open a little at one end to expose some powder, and the powder just burns. BUT! Hit them with a hammer once it starts to burn and you get a heck of a good bang out of them.

Can't imagine how you'd do the hammer quick enough with a pile of black powder, but I'm betting if your timing was right you'd get a heck of a bang rather than a whoosh.

 

[Vaino]

I can humbly say that I don't know exactly what all the possibilities are to ignite black powder...but every so often a commercial powder mill explodes. Whatever "building" the explosions take place in {usually the corning shack}, the wall boards are nailed loosely from the outside so as to not contain the explosive force.

Exploding powder mills have occurred through out history and even into modern times and one would think the managements of these black powder companies would have known by this time exactly what is causing these BP mills to explode. But they haven't. A few years back, a Goex or Dupont BP mill exploded....Fred

 

[Billnpatti]

Black powder cannot be ignited by concussion unless a spark is created somehow by the concussion. You can pour some black powder out on an anval and smack it as hard as you can with a sledge hammer and it will not go off so long as you don't produce a spark.

Black powder cannot be ignited by a static electric spark. As much as it seems as though a static electric spark will ignite black powder, many experiments have proven that not to be so.

One misstatement by one poster said that graphite is a poor conductor of electricity. It is not. In fact, it is a very good conductor of electricity. The carbon arc lights and furnaces have graphite rods to which an electric current is applied to cause the carbon arc. If graphite did not conduct elecricity, these rods would not work. They do, ergo, graphite is a good conductor of electricity.

Without a spark of some kind, static electricity excluded, or fire, black powder is quite stable.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Both statements are technically true.
A static charge will ignite BP if it is large enough (think lightning)
Hitting it with a 8 oz hammer will most likely not produce enough heat to detonate, but a 20 ton hammer is another story!
Even a simple fire piston will develop temperatures around 900 degrees

If you refer to the Goex MSDS sheet BP has an auto ignition temp between 392 -867 F

 

[coloradoclyde]

One misstatement by one poster said that graphite is a poor conductor of electricity. It is not. In fact, it is a very good conductor of electricity. The carbon arc lights and furnaces have graphite rods to which an electric current is applied to cause the carbon arc. If graphite did not conduct elecricity, these rods would not work. They do, ergo, graphite is a good conductor of electricity.

Reminds me of a story about scientists that went to Africa to figure out why members of a certain tribe kept getting struck by lightning. They discovered that the fire pits in the village had been there for centuries. On a landscape with few trees the fire pits acted like lightning rods due to centuries of carbon deposits.

 

[mooman76]

Coal plats also will catch fire and explode it they don't keep the coal dust from building up. Spontaneous combustion I believe is the culprit there.

 

[Stumpkiller]

Grain elevators will explode from a spark in the dust. Tiny particles of about anything have an explosive quality if ignited.

I worked at a chemical plant that used microscopic plastic beads (PMMA Beads) to aid in getting emulsions to flow. They had to be stored in a special explosion-proof building as something as simple as plugging a cord in a wall outlet or flicking a light switch could cause a gigantic explosion if they were stirred up and in the air. And the blast wave of a little explosion puts more in the air - triggering a cascade effect. The one story building was surrounded by a 10 ft berm - looked like the bunkers the Germans tested V2s at!

And these were just little bacteria size acrylic particles.

 

[TNGhost]

seems to me that concussive ignition is what made the toy "cap guns" of my youth work...

No. :shake: Those had other ingrediants much like perc caps and modern cartridge primers. And, they were dangerous things. Fun though. :wink:

Don't know about dangerous, but roll caps are sure getting hard to find around here. :hmm:

 

[Col. Batguano]

I wonder how susceptible to ignition the BP dust is that seems to rise up whenever we pour powder. The other evening I was transferring powder from one half-used can to another (using a plastic funnel), and a thin dust plume was rising and making its' way toward the electric lights. I was wondering if I got that zzzz electric arc thing with the light if it had a chance to ignite the dust plume, and of course then the powder, me, and then the house that Jack built.

 

[Oudoceus]

Don't try this at home kids. I just put a small amount of 4F Geox between two pieces of packing tape, put it on my anvil and hit it with a hammer. Nothing. I finally hit it so hard I busted my hammer though.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Let him try that with a 100 million volt 50 k amp plasma producing lightning bolt.