How to Make Black Powder With Tom Perigrin.

Summary

In this informative and hands-on video, Tom Perigrin demonstrates how to make black powder using Skylighter's black powder kit with red gum. The method is accessible and doesn't require complicated equipment. Tom walks through the step-by-step process, highlighting the importance of grind consistency, mixing techniques, and safety precautions. By the end, he compares his homemade product with commercial black powder, showcasing its effectiveness despite the simplicity of the tools used.

Highlights

• Tom uses Skylighter's kit, which requires no fancy tools, to make black powder. 🎩
• Key ingredients include potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, bound together with red gum. 🧪
• Tom grinds and screens potassium nitrate for proper oxygen release, essential for effective black powder. 👀
• Demonstrates a simple yet effective technique for mixing ingredients thoroughly. 🍲
• Shares safety tips and funny anecdotes, maintaining a great learning environment. 📚
• Homemade black powder comes close to commercial quality with the right process! ⚗️

Key Takeaways

• Learn to make black powder using Skylighter's kit with Tom Perigrin's guidance! 🚀
• No fancy equipment needed – just patience and precision! 🛠️
• Safety first! Handle chemicals and tools with care and caution. 🧤
• Grinding and mixing correctly is key to quality black powder. 🎯
• Homemade black powder can compete closely with commercial versions! 🎆

Overview

Tom Perigrin takes center stage in this DIY video, revealing the secrets of crafting black powder using the Skylighter black powder kit. With heaps of charm and expertise, Tom guides viewers through the process, ensuring it's straightforward and accessible. From the initial unboxing to the final, vibrant burn test, Tom's attentiveness to detail stands out as he transforms raw ingredients into this explosive compound.

Starting with the importance of each ingredient – potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal – Tom emphasizes the crucial role of grinding and screening. He introduces the audience to practical tools like coffee grinders and aluminum trays, ensuring quality and safety throughout the tutorial. With easy-to-follow instructions, Tom brings a mix of science and simplicity, making pyrotechnics approachable for enthusiasts and hobbyists alike.

What sets this tutorial apart is Tom's blend of technical know-how and entertaining storytelling. His anecdotes, especially about past mishaps, lighten the air while effectively reinforcing the importance of caution. The video wraps up with a comparative analysis, where Tom confidently pits his handmade black powder against a commercial variant, demonstrating the impressive quality achievable even with modest equipment.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Overview This chapter introduces Tom Peragon, who explains how to make black powder using the Skylighter Black Powder Kit with red gum. He emphasizes that this method does not require any fancy equipment, making it accessible for beginners or those without specialized tools.
• 01:00 - 04:00: Materials and Equipment The chapter discusses the composition and preparation of black powder using a fine grind of potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal. The mixture is bound together using red gum, allowing it to be used by virtually anyone to produce a good quality product. The transcript hints at a comparison that will be shown at the end. There is a mention of a large bag of air-flat charcoal being the first item observed in the box.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Preparing Red Gum Solution The chapter discusses the process of preparing a Red Gum solution, starting with the observation of materials such as air float, sulfur, and a small bag of red gum. The narrator notes the differences in density between these materials, highlighting that even a small amount of red gum is sufficient as only 1% is needed. Additionally, it mentions that potassium nitrate is shipped separately to avoid mixing incompatible chemicals.
• 06:00 - 10:00: Grinding Potassium Nitrate The chapter discusses the tools and materials needed for grinding potassium nitrate. A balance, clean cups, spoons, gloves, a respirator, a coffee grinder, screens, an aluminum tray, denatured alcohol, and Static Guard are mentioned as necessary items. The chapter seems to focus on the initial steps of preparation.
• 10:00 - 17:00: Combining Ingredients The chapter 'Combining Ingredients' details the preparation of chemicals for a later process. It describes dissolving red gum in denatured alcohol and grinding and screening potassium nitrate using a second-hand coffee grinder. The first step involves weighing out the red gum.
• 17:00 - 26:00: Pressing and Granulating Black Powder The chapter discusses the process of pressing and granulating black powder, highlighting safety precautions that may be necessary, such as using a dust mask. The speaker specifically mentions potassium nitrate, commonly known as a fertilizer, and red gum, a type of plant secretion, but does not use a dust mask due to the small quantities being handled and for ease of communication. More dangerous chemicals require stricter safety measures.
• 26:00 - 30:00: Drying and Storing Black Powder The chapter focuses on the safety measures and techniques involved in handling and preparing black powder, specifically highlighting the use of protective equipment like dust masks when dealing with certain chemicals such as barium and arsenic. The process of weighing ingredients accurately is also touched upon, emphasizing the need to zero out a balance before measurement.
• 30:00 - 41:00: Testing and Comparison The chapter titled 'Testing and Comparison' discusses a process involving the use of clean utensils, specifically mentioning the use of a 'clean spoon'. This is followed by references to different numerical values: 2.4, 2.9, and 3 G. The mention of 'Music' suggests that the numerical values might relate to some rating or measurement that's being reviewed or tested. The speaker notes the importance of water, potentially for cleaning the spoon before use, implying a focus on cleanliness and accuracy in the testing process. The specifics of what is being tested or compared are not detailed in the given transcript segment.
• 41:00 - 45:00: Conclusion In the conclusion chapter, the author emphasizes the importance of avoiding cross-contamination while handling chemicals. Specifically, they detail the process of measuring out red gum and transferring it into an Erlenmeyer flask. The chapter highlights the careful transfer process to prevent spills and notes the potential use of alternative containers such as a mason jar, provided they are suitable for use with denatured alcohol.

How to Make Black Powder With Tom Perigrin. Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music] hi I'm Tom peragon and today I'll be using the skylighter black powder kit with red gum to make black powder now this is one that doesn't need any fancy equipment it uses
• 00:30 - 01:00 a fine grind of potassium nitrate sulfur and charcoal to make a fairly fast black powder and it binds it together using red gum that means that pretty much anyone can use it it produces a pretty good product and you'll see at the end how it Compares let's look into the box first thing I see is a nice big bag of Air flat charcoal it's large because because
• 01:00 - 01:30 air float is very non-dense next thing I see is a bag of sulfur it's smaller even though it weighs the same because it's a lot more dense and then the last thing I see in this box is a wee little bag of red gum at first that concerned me but you only need 1% so a small bag is enough in the other box there was the potassium nitrate this is shipped separately to keep incompatible chemicals away from
• 01:30 - 02:00 each other in shipping these are some of the other things that I'll be utilizing a balance clean cups to weigh things into clean spoons gloves a respirator coffee grinder screens of various sizes an aluminum tray denatured alcohol that I got from The Big Box store and Static Guard to help keep static down on dry days the first thing I want to do is to
• 02:00 - 02:30 process my chemicals so that they're in the best form possible for use later on in the process that means I'll be dissolving the red gum in denatured alcohol and I'll be grinding and screening the potassium nitrate using a old coffee grinder that I picked up cheap at one of the used stores so first thing is to weigh out the red
• 02:30 - 03:00 gum now with some of these things you might want to use a dust mask I'm not going to do that here because the quantities are small and it would interfere with my ability to talk but with more dangerous chemicals potassium nitrate is just a fertilizer red gum is a plant exudate but with more dangerous
• 03:00 - 03:30 things such as barium the rare times one uses arsonic Etc a a simple dusk mask is a very good idea all right so I'm going to zero out my balance and I'm going to I need to zero it out without the spoon in it and I'm going to weigh out 3 G
• 03:30 - 04:00 I'm using a clean spoon OH Close 2.4 [Music] 2.9 and 3 G now water that spoon before I use it
• 04:00 - 04:30 again I like to try and keep my chemicals from getting cross contamination now having measured out the red gum I transfer that into an Erin Meer flask of course I could also use a small mason jar or anything which is good for use with denatured alcohol now I transfer this slowly so as to not spill any
• 04:30 - 05:00 note that I have put a large piece of craft paper on the table so that if there is a spill it's very easy to clean up all right now this I'm not going to try and wash and reuse once again I want to avoid cross contamination conveniently this Erland Meer has measurements on the sides so so I can
• 05:00 - 05:30 easily measure the 125 ml that is required I use a little less than the exact amount because it's always easy to add more it's a little difficult to remove some so now I give this a few Swirls and I'll set this aside and swirl
• 05:30 - 06:00 it from time to time to help get it all dissolved the next thing to do in preparing my chemicals is to convert the potassium nitrate from something that is just a little smaller than table salt to a very fine powder the reason I have to do that is because it's going to provide the oxygen and if it's in too large of a grain it will take too long for the heat to penetrate deeply into the Grain and release the oxygen so by having it as
• 06:00 - 06:30 very fine powder the heat will penetrate very easily and Liberate the oxygen very quickly so what I'm going to do is use this coffee grinder which I picked up at a recycle store and I will use that to grind the potassium nitrate then I will screen it using this screen now normally I would have liked
• 06:30 - 07:00 to have used this screen it's not these are analytical and are meant to be used to determine the size rather than to sift but unfortunately this screen has given up the ghost it was made out of brass and with all the corrosive chemicals we use it has met its end so I'm going to have to rebuild this screen until then I'll use the analytical screen
• 07:00 - 07:30 so the process is fairly simple I open the potassium nitrate and I use a clean spoon and I put in some of the potassium nitrate into the coffee grinder not too much at first it might seem that putting in a lot would mean that you grind a lot but there's only a certain certain amount of material that hits the blades
• 07:30 - 08:00 every second and if you if there's a lot of um potassium nitrate in here you won't get a very fast grinding action uh so just a little bit and then grind it for a good long time now having ground my potassium nitrate it's time to screen out the particles that are still too large from those that are fine in enough so I will
• 08:00 - 08:30 open this carefully cuz there could well be some dust from the grinding process and I pour it fairly carefully into the screen so as to not get dust going each and everywhere this gives us a nice pile of material in there and we can I can shake it
• 08:30 - 09:00 around but it takes a long time to shake it and get it through so I'm going to speed up the process a little bit by just gently helping it through the screen I don't want to push too hard cuz if I push too hard I can deform the openings in the screen it'll no longer be accurate and that's more important with these analytical screen scre than
• 09:00 - 09:30 with the production screens so I will rub this for perhaps a minute and then we'll see what we've got so I'll be back in a minute so it's been about a minute of rubbing as you can see I've got about perhaps 2/3 of the weight through I might be able to get a little more but I'm not going to be greedy because honestly I've been doing this for a while getting ready for this video so I think I might have enough of the
• 09:30 - 10:00 material already before we mix it I'm going to save the potassium nitrate that I've already screened now it's humid today it's already started to Clump together it may well need to be reprocessed again but I don't want to put it back in with the really coarse stuff so I'm going to put it into a food storage container that I stole from my wife's kitchen
• 10:00 - 10:30 and it will never go back anything that I use for pyro is only for pyro nothing gets put back into the kitchen or into the food just keep it all separate among other things that helps me keep my wife who is a molecular biologist and understands this sort of stuff it keeps my wife happy here and
• 10:30 - 11:00 keeps us all safer and I will mark this with the name and the date and uh keep it separately from everything else now that I've got everything ground up and whiteed out it's time to do the mixing I'm going to use another one of these uh tubs that I seal for my wife when she's not at home and
• 11:00 - 11:30 when I pour the air float I do it very carefully if I were to pour it from here I would end up with air float covering me so I get very close and tilt the cup and that's how I get the air float in Sulfur goes on top of that the order doesn't really matter but I don't like to put the float in first because when you put the heavy chemicals on the air float guess what it causes it
• 11:30 - 12:00 to floof up and once again it's not a very pleasant experience seal the tub and make sure you hold the top on number of years ago I was just I was demonstrating how to make a black powder type mix for Fountains at Western winter blast I'd gotten to this point but because we were doing it for about 30 people to make their own I had a very large tub right behind me was Doc Bar's
• 12:00 - 12:30 car and I proceeded to start to shake it and within a couple moments because I didn't have my fingers on the top it went like that the top went like that the charcoal and everything went like that and it coated doc Bar's car with air float and nitrate and sulfur it was not a good thing he was not happy we were able to make him happy it involved a car wash and lot of adult beverages
• 12:30 - 13:00 but try I I'm always try to make sure the top stays on now it's hard to say how long to do the first shaking it's not going to do a really great mixing but you want to make sure that it's mixed fairly well so I'm going to do this for about a minute I'll be back in that time okay so I've been doing this now
• 13:00 - 13:30 for about a minute and it's time to put it through the screen because there's air floating here I want to treat it as if it's going to try and coat me from top to bottom with black powder so I try and dump it as gently as possible and you can see that there's a fair amount of white and
• 13:30 - 14:00 yellow particles still in it and that's to be expected and that's part of what screening it through this screen will help do is start mixing them that's one reason why I have to do it three times because you need to break up you can see little clumps of whiteness in there and little clumps of yellow as I said it's humid today so the potassium nitrate was
• 14:00 - 14:30 starting to Clump a little bit and the sulfur is always clumpy so this will take a minute or two and I'll see you back in that period of time this has been in the alcohol for a long time yeah I don't see any little residual particles on the bottom so it's good and ready to go what I'm going to do now is use an aluminum baking an
• 14:30 - 15:00 aluminum 9x13 pan uh to bind it I pull out the oh yeah that looks great once again it's finally powdered if you give it a chance it will floof all over you did you see that just a tiny little bit there we go
• 15:00 - 15:30 now I like to take a trick from baking and that is to make a well in the center where I'm going to pour my liquid so going to add a fair amount at first maybe 2/3 now I don't mind using a spoon that's been contaminated with pottassium nitrate or charcoal or sulfur for this
• 15:30 - 16:00 step because it's already in there but I wouldn't use any just random spoon off of my work area and it soaked up the liquid now the skylighter instruction say to use this respiratory mask and it's a good idea you don't want to be breathing a lot of
• 16:00 - 16:30 solvent however if I were to wear that so I'm not going to wear it at this time okay it's starting to compact nicely into there so I'm going to make the well again pour in a little more I feel it's starting to get to the right consistency what I'm looking for is a shiny ball and it's starting to Clump but it's not
• 16:30 - 17:00 a shiny wet ball so mix it all through make sure everything has a good chance to get wet and I'll put the rest of this in that's the full 3 G of red gum I may have to add more but all I have to do is add liquid the denatured alcohol rather
• 17:00 - 17:30 than more red gum it's got all the red gum it's going to need that's one reason I like to go a little bit shy with the amount of alcohol when dissolving the red gum I don't want to get to a point where I only add 2/3 of the liquid that would only add 2/3 the amount of red gum okay it's all in there it's not
• 17:30 - 18:00 forming a shiny ball so I'm going to add some more denatured alcohol going to add this little bit at a time there that's starting to look good
• 18:00 - 18:30 this little piece is a bit wet but there's still some comparatively dry yep it's starting to distribute nicely there we go that's a nice dry that and use it in one heck of an interesting BAS baseball
• 18:30 - 19:00 game so I'll soak up all the little particles scrape the corners and I'm going to let that sit for a few
• 19:00 - 19:30 minutes while I get the area set up for the next step I've got a big stainless steel tray I would have preferred aluminum but I have stainless steel and this is a four mesh screen all I got gather up the
• 19:30 - 20:00 ball and this next step is pretty easy pretty quick and very gratifying because you're getting there you're home home stretch you just scrape it through
• 20:00 - 20:30 now I have a little brush over here I use that to help poke it out of the screen openings now at this point this is a fairly dangerous little tray of
• 20:30 - 21:00 stuff it has a black powder which is wetted with highly flammable alcohol so you definitely want to make sure there's nobody smoking uh you don't want to have anything like a uh water heater with a pilot light or furnace with a pilot light you want to treat this with a huge degree of respect so ier to do so could be a
• 21:00 - 21:30 serious issue okay now I spread it out being very gentle this stuff is easy to Clump up so I just spread it as e as much as I can and and that is now allowed to
• 21:30 - 22:00 sit in the sun if it's sunny or outside the alcohol will evaporate quite quickly however I always try to make sure that not only do I not smell any alcohol that it's been an hour or two since I smelled any alcohol cuz there will be some inside the grains and it takes a while for it to percolate out but at this point I now have about uh
• 22:00 - 22:30 300 G of a form of black powder and in a little bit we'll look at how it burns and we'll compare it with commercial black powder the black powder is now dry I'm going to sift it into minus 20 and plus 20 utilizing a good old kitchen screen which never will go into the kitchen aluminum baking tray and a spoon unlike the previous process this will be
• 22:30 - 23:00 fairly simple because I don't have to push it through the screen I'm down to the last little
• 23:00 - 23:30 grains so I'll transfer those in and continue with my sifting now I've got all the course material selected and I'll put that aside label it carefully date and what it is what about the fine material well it is supposedly coated with red gum so just a few dry of alcohol and it should
• 23:30 - 24:00 stick together or there's many places one can use fine powder making quick match coating rice Halls all sorts of uses for it so I'm going to store this in another food tub and label it and use it as minus 20 black powder so what did we get well I've got two flavors of black powder extra crunchy the stuff which is retained on a 20 grit
• 24:00 - 24:30 screen it's probably a good 200 g there perhaps as much as 24050 and the very fine powdered material of which there's probably 15 or 20 G and so the question comes how I store
• 24:30 - 25:00 it this is a highly flammable material I wouldn't want to store it in my bedroom my kitchen or any place like that I also wouldn't want to store it anywhere near anything with an open flame such as a gas water heater gas furnace or anything also anything that makes Sparks so it's for me I have an indoor type 2 magazine you can get the batf
• 25:00 - 25:30 orange book by searching for batf orange book and it has instructions on how you construct an indoor magazine an outdoor magazine all sorts of things I recommend reading that book because it has a lot of good information inside of it and it's free you can also get it as a PDF so this will go into my indoor magazine
• 25:30 - 26:00 and later I'll show you how it burns for right now it's time to clean up and go get dinner now we'll do a quick test comparing the goex Canon powder with the skylighter red gum powder the first shot will be a baseball from a 3-in mortar propelled by 15 G of goex Canon powder note how the flame and smoke dissipated
• 26:00 - 26:30 quite quickly that's because everything was consumed quite quickly and all the particles were of a fairly even size now I'll be using 30 G of the skylighter black powder red gum this one I didn't sort after the 20 mesh screening to get out the finds you'll see the result of that immediately after the shot there'll be a lot of smoke there will be a lot of Fire it did a lot better when I actually did
• 26:30 - 27:00 sort it so that it was about 8 to 20 mesh so that's how I use the skylighter red gum black powder kit to make approximately 300 G of black powder it's not as good as commercial but considering the simple equipment that we are able to use to make it it's surprisingly good until I see you next time Tom paragan