Miller, your post brought back some choice vignettes of days many years ago when as a young kid interested in guns and chemistry, I would buy pound after pound of saltpeter (75 cents per pound) and mix it with a variety of ingredients including sugar. Commercial black powder for sporting purposes wasn't sold anywhere nearby but every once in a while I got my hands on some "black pellet powder" that someone's dad or graddad brought home from the mines years before. Pellet powder was compressed black powder with a slightly different formulation, obsolete in the mines when I was a kid due to risk of setting off methane. Miners often brought extra caps and powder home and my own grandfather had a stash of stuff in the wood cellar for the 4th of July and use around the property. When I did get my hands on pellet powder we would use it in regular and homemade muzzleloading guns. Also used the homemade mixes for the same purposes.
Yep I cooked ingredients on the stove and did some other stupid things. Fortunately never got hurt. That was during the start of the space race and NASA, and almost all the young guys were building homemade rockets. I had a homemade "matchlock" muzzleloader that was set off with a wooden kitchen match driven forward by a lock powered with rubber bands. A little innovation there.
The sugar mixture mix you asked about would burn comparatively slowly, not as well as regular black powder. I remember reading about "brown powder" in a book and as I recall it was made from a different type of charcoal. It was considered somewhat stronger than regular black powder although I'm pretty sure it didn't have sugar in the formula.
Sadly, days gone by. Not that long ago really. My friends and I had some good clean fun and never did anything destructive with our homemade stuff. My experiences during that time frame set the stage for my education, career and hobbies. I bought the saltpeter in a drug store and I often think about that when in modern drug stores picking up meds, etc. Can you imagine the alarms that would ring if a 12 or 13 year old kid walked into a store today and asked for saltpeter? Besides the police there would be calls to the mental health people and social agencies to figure out what he's up to and how his parents went wrong in his upbringing. Hey, I think you can still buy saltpeter in small quantities in farm feed and fertilizer stores. It hasn't been in drug stores in years. The fertilizer grade is probably NaNO3 versus KNO3 but it will still work okay.
Thanks for the memories. Silvers
