American made Powders?

[antelopedundee]

If I had to take a swing at it I would imagine that it has to do with the global potassium nitrate supply chain. My assumption is that there are relatively few sources of potassium nitrate worldwide (industrial scale sources), there are probably less in the US than in Europe/Asia and those in the US are probably ear marked for the military.

Europe/Canada have militaries a fraction the size of ours per capita so they probably don't restrict the commercial use of domestically produced potassium nitrate. The other components are fairly common, so I would imagine you build your factory near the source of the most limited ingredient.

I'm sure the real answer is vastly more complicated, but it probably goes something like that...

They use nitric acid to produce nitrocellulose I think. Why would they use potassium nitrate? With KNO3 you'd have to use some other acid which doesn't make sense and introduces a contaminant.

 

[BrentD]

I'm poking around my reloding bench and noticed that my bottle of RL 15 says "made in Sweden", RL 17 and RL 26 say "made in Switzerland", all my Hodgdon powders are from Austrlia, and my Ramshot Big Game, which has a MT phone number and a Miles City address, was made in Belgium. Does anyone know why all these powders are made else where? And are there any truly American powders?

Goex. I confess, I use Swiss powder, but Goex is the only American powder.

 

[Ben Lamb]

Rabbit hole time: https://www.nytimes.com/1861/08/10/...manufacture-where-and-how-it-is-made-the.html

Cool article from the NYT about manufacturing gunpowder in the US & a new discovery in cannon powder.

From 1861.

 

[Deleted member 28227]

They use nitric acid to produce nitrocellulose I think. Why would they use potassium nitrate? With KNO3 you'd have to use some other acid which doesn't make sense and introduces a contaminant.

My knowledge of making gun powder is limited to Kirk's fight with the gorn, I was simply suggesting that there were certain domestic and geopolitical reasons for production locations.

 

[ImBillT]

The ones I was reading about were additives that would essentially eliminate powder and copper fouling and as I said contained "rare earth" compounds. Those will persist in some form in the environment. They don't burn up. IIRC it was on benchrestcentral.com

Either they aren’t listed in the SDS, or Alliant doesn’t use that for their copper fouling additive. The SDS I took those from was listed under RL-23, but after opening it said it was for the Reloader series and a couple other powders.

 

[ImBillT]

They use nitric acid to produce nitrocellulose I think. Why would they use potassium nitrate? With KNO3 you'd have to use some other acid which doesn't make sense and introduces a contaminant.

KNO3 is used for black powder. He probably assumed it was used in all gun powder.

 

[mtmuley]

Long as it ain't made in China, I don't see a problem. mtmuley

 

[Brian in Montana]

I read an interesting article in Bugle a while back about the history of the major powder companies. I don't recall many of the details but it seems most started out in the US, but after a series of exploding factories local communities got a little edgy about them. Some shut down, some moved to other locals as their safety increased.

Anybody else read that article?

 

[Miller8812]

If you don’t know what the additive is, then you can’t say that they don’t disappear when the powder is burned.

“ The law of conservation of mass states that mass in an isolated system is neither created nor destroyed by chemical reactions or physical transformations. According to the law of conservation of mass, the mass of the products in a chemical reaction must equal the mass of the reactants.”