Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
well black powder is just a mixture of charcoal (you need wood and mud to make a charcoal pit), saltpeter (aka potassium nitrate), and sulfur. nitrate is found in many household products - hence the bathtub chemistry. there's a lot of that stuff all over the place, it's in just about everything - from salts, makeup products, fertilizer, plant food, etc. I'd use that first while building a natural extraction process since it takes a long time, months usually.
you'd take dung from animals (horse works well or cow patties), wood ash, dry straw, and lots of urine (barrels of the stuff). a few months later you drain off the liquid, boil it with finely ground charcoal and then filter it with cloth. simmer the strained liquid until it's reduced by 3/4, you want it really concentrated. spill it out onto very shallow pans and let it dry to crystalize the nitrates. sulfur is readily obtained from many sources - usually volcanic but these days its in a lot of building/construction materials like gypsum. basic chemistry will allow you to extract it. I live near geologically active areas, so sulfur would be relatively easy to obtain in the future.
there's no real set recipe for black powder, but approx 75% dried & powdered nitrates, 15% dried and powdered charcoal, 10% dried and powdered sulfur. you want to grind each individually and then mix them together in those ratios. now you have black powder. keep it dry and away from spaks/flame/heat - bull horns work really well for this.
casting shot is just melting lead in a specific form - my father probable still has his old tools for that but if he doesnt they're not hard to make. the only tricky bit in the whole process of building your own diy black powder rifle is the barrel - you have to hand forge those around a mandrel (a rod of a specific thickness) - I'd use high grade steel rods for that, since they're just laying around. blacksmithing is usually a two or three person setup. once I had a water wheel constructed I'd probably build a hydraulic powered trip hammer to make things easier.
I feel like if this ever happened, you’d want to practice that first step, because it might be easier to get gallons of urine then extract from a number of those sources.
the average person produces about 5 cups of urine in a day, and a gallon is 16 cups, so a group of people could easily produce anywhere between 1 and 3 gallons every day. the standard drum size is 55 gallons, so that's easily obtainable. it's a very slow synthesis, lasting 6+ months, you'd have between 3 and 10+ drums full of urine saved up at that point.
the average black powder musket or rifle gets about 50 shots per pound of black powder, and it takes a good minute or so to reload if you're skilled, so you really dont carry that much powder around with you at any point in time. I figure you wouldnt need more that 5 pounds of it every month in a survival/hunting/defense against random invaders (rural setting) situation.