Factory Ammo Powder

[Ignatz]

Do the major ammo manufactures use their own powders like we use or do they "blend" their own secret formulas? I can see Winchester using their own powders but what would Federal use?

[HSMITH]

They buy huge lots of powder, that may or may not be similar to powders you and I can pick up off the shelf.

They develop a load with the lot of powder that they bought, handloading and chronographing just like you and I do as well as pressure testing, and load hundreds of thousands to many millions of rounds with that load.

There are basically two major sources of powder in the western world, and powder that comes from one plant and the same batch may have serveral different brands and names on it by the time it hits the store shelves.

[JD McDorce]

but what would Federal use?

Alliant would be a pretty good guess...

[wsimpso1]

+1 on the development process. My experience in the industry was in the first half of the 1980's, but I do not suspect that things have changed that much. Most of the powders will always be a commericial variant of something like what we use. Our handloader powders are made up by blending different batches because we need it to be niform in pressure behaviour from batch to batch. They do less of that for factory powders, and the load is adjusted for each lot of powder. Names are different. Some cartridges do have powders that are specially adjusted to circumstances - flash inhibiters and coatings o slow down the initial burn, but most are just variants of what we use...

Powder makers are several (still in touch a little), IMR (Valleyfield, DuPont, etc), Alliant (Hercules), Winchester (Olin), then in much smaller amounts, the Scandinavian, South African, Israeli, and Austrailians. Shipping large amounts of powder is tough because it still has to be in relatively small kegs, so, you will not see much of it...

So Grasshopper, why do you ask?

Billski

[kevin c]

My understanding is that a good amount of the powder used in commercial loading originally was surplus cannon powder, mechanically and chemically broken down and reformulated. One charge for a sixteen inch naval gun would make for an awful lot of 9mm cartridges. That was back in the sixties in the US, I don't know about now, nor what foreign manufacturers use as base material.

But it is true, as stated above, that "canister powders" for reloading are adjusted to be as uniform as possible from lot to lot, as opposed to commercial powder, where the load is adjusted to the powder, and not the other way around.

[blackdragon]

St. Marks, Is a large supplier world wide!

Ivan

[sargenv]

I don't know about now, nor what foreign manufacturers use as base material.

I suspect that most manufacturers use either wood pulp or cotton as a base material for their smokeless powders. I recall reading something about Accurate Arms powders saying that they use only virgin cotton unlike some other manufacturers who use sawdust aquired as scrap from lumber mills for their base cellulose material. Depending on the powder, it may be single base (all nitro cellulose) or double base (Nitro-cellulose and nitro-glycerin). Most of the powders on the IMR line are single base, and I do know that a lot of the ball powders and the stuff available from Alliant are double based. I don't know what Vitt uses as their base but whatever it is, it sure is clean (from what people tell me).

Vince

[wsimpso1]

The comment about recycled cannon powder is true. Winchester bought up huge amounts of cannon powder (stick powder kernals the size of pencils on up to thumb size), built huge concrete vats that sat below ground level, and stored the surplus powder in them (cool and under water). That was their nitrocellulose source for Winchester Ball powders for decades. Story is that they ran out in the 1990's and have been making NC ever since. They have had to make their own nitroglycerine the whole time.

Everybody else has just been making NC and NG. I personally witnessed NC production at Hercules' site in the 1980's. It truely is amazing how energetic things can get when you wash organic chemicals with nitric acid... When Hercules had a fire there, the local government told them to go elsewhere to build a new powder plant, and they did.

DuPont used to make NC at a place called Carney's Point, and they had a fire there that caused them to develop the whole process of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. The site managers thought that any fire they had would be contained in one spot, but it went from building to building until most of the site was toast. DuPont figured out that they were not really making any money in that business and so they did not rebuild. Expro (Valleyfield, maybe other names) has been the maker of IMR powders ever since, and they were (maybe still are) making NC & NG near Montreal.

Billski

[Harmon]

Winchester 9mm and 40 caliber ammo can be duplicated with WSF powder

winchester 45s go with Win 231

CCI, federal, speer 9mm, 40 and 45 seem to use a modified titegroup powder. you can come close to duplicating them with Titegroup.

Remington is the odd one out...they use whatever the F they want.

Harmon