wju92

Thanks everyone for your help.

I use chempak sulfur, I buy it from a garden centre in doncaster who also sell potassium nitrate. It seems to be good quality to me, and I use it in my fast 24 hour milled willow BP. I think from the way it is in solid pellets, it is roll sulfur, rather than the acidic flowers of sulfur. Flowers of sulfur can only be found in powdered form as far as I can remember, due to the way it is produced.

I think you should probably start looking into the charcoal and processing more than anything, also try extremely small batches of meal powder in your mortar and pestle, such as only one gram. The time to grind doesnt seem proportional to the amount of material in the mortar and pestle, for instance:
1g might take 5 minutes to reach the same burn rate/mesh size, whereas 5g might take over an hour!

To improve the quality further, you might want to look into the CIA method, although I have no experience of this. Better still use a ball mill.

does it need to be really fine like flour to burn quikly. and i will get willow charcoal tomorrow

how fine where the chemicals ??? how did you grind the sulphur, how did you mix it.....and was it lumpwood charcoal, or compressed stuff.


im my experience, bbq style charcoal is pants....other people have had good results though.

it was lumpwood, i used a wooden pestle and mortar. the powder wasn't like flour but i couldn't get it any better

I would bet that Garden Direct sulphur is 'Flowers of sulphur', which is fine (ish) for BP but, you want to find a low acidic sulphur and your best bet is 'Rhombic Sulphur'

the sulphur is bright yellow 2-3 mm discs no information on packet about its acidity.

The percentage of sulfur should be on the bag. IMHO, if its at least 90% there should be no problem using it for black powder, lift, etc.

90% sulfur will make BP that has only 1% clay or other non-sulfur ingredients in it if you use the standard 75/15/10 ratio.

thanks i made some black powder with GD pottasium nitrate BBQ charcoal and the Chempac sulphur it had a really slow burn. about a half inch round, centimetre high mound burnt in, 2-3 seconds with a weired hard brown residue any ideas? i think i should be using willow charcoal. the box doesn't say anthing on percentage.