Black powder in glass ???

luftmech

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Is it taboo to store our black powder in glass ? I was looking at an old Bombay gin bottle and thought that it would look nice and be allot easier to pour. It is in a cold room so light won't effect it, the bottle might break but other then that is there any concerns with effecting performance ? ( the powder not the gin, we all know too much gin effects performance )
 
Some plastics are static-free... I would not recommand a glass container for black powder. When BP ignites in a plastic container, cardboard or a tin plate container (like the ones the powder come into), there is no explosion and no fragmentation. In a glass container, there would probably be an explosion and dangerous fragmentation. Furthermore, a glass container is fragile and I believe it is illegal to store BP in it!
 
Glass is a huge no-no. It's simply dangerous and could easily result in a very unpleasant experience. Think "deep penetrating glass shards".

I recall reading that the French Foreign Legion used a glass hand grenade (not unlike the Ordnance Department's "flaming bomb" logo) in the late 19th century. They had a reputation for producing nasty, deep wounds.
 
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That is good, but raises one more question that keeps repeating itself. How many of you have had spontanious combustion of properly stored inert black powder ? It seems the main problem with glass is the threat of shrapnel in the event of ignition with no adverse affect on the powder itself...? just curious.
 
Honestly.... Glass is as safe as anything else really other than the obvious that if you drop it you're going to have powder and glass everywhere to clean up... As for static you'll have no more or less than with plastic or even tin.. "Personally" I store my powder in it's original container.. However I always have about a pound in a horn as well.. Put it in the Glass container just make sure it has a good fitting tight lid (don't want to ruin your powder!) and for Pete's sake don't drop it! As for the "grenade argument I'm sure glass sucks to get hit with but so does metal from the original container... Bottom line house is on fire.. Fire spreads to where your powder is.. Warn the firefighters and get the hell out of dodge.
 
I store mine in a red 1 gallon gas can, holds ten pounds.
The original cans have weak seams, so I am not too sure how much they would fragment if ignited, and I am not going to lead the charge to find out!:eek:
Cat
 
Concerning the myths about static ignition of BB, start here: http://www.ctmuzzleloaders.com/mlexperiments/sparks/sparks.html
In other forums, Bill Knight has quoted both government and manufacturer experiments dating back through at least the early twentieth century, and, as I recall, NOBODY could be glazed or unglazed powder grains to ignite without a high-amperage current.

Powder dust is another matter, like grain dust or coal dust, but it is improbable that anyone outside a powder mill could inadvertantly generate a high-enough concentration in the air to permit a dust explosion.

Joel
 
I've tried pretty much everything you can think of with black powder (I'm a licensed pyrotechnician) and I can tell you that original black powder containers do not produce any fragments when ignited... Even the metal ones.

As an aside, there were glass grenades that used black powder and they were nasty! There were also glass mortar rounds during WW1 that were fired from air-mortars! Glass is really bad in wounds because is is hard to see and invisible on X-ray...
 
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