Ozarks Monte, SASS #66019 Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 1000 Lb Boom At Goex Plant. http://www.press-her...-news&Itemid=69 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashpowder Hal Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 Right outa hi-skool ah w*$ked at a plant thet made military flares and arty sheels. Ya' cud only wear cotton button-fly clothes, no jewelry and no matches or lighters allowed. Yet about once ah year they'd have a fire or explosion, with folks kilt Hazardous field ah endeavor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Mountain Charlie SASS #43172 Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 No good can come of using this nasty stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashpowder Hal Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 Ah loves da' smell of Holey Black inda mornin' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coydog Talking, Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 How can you decimate one building! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashpowder Hal Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 The walls are thick cement and the roof offers no contaiment, so most of an explosion goes UP! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dirty Dan Dawkins Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 They'll need one hell of a blow tube to keep the fouling soft. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doc Windshadow Posted June 10, 2011 Share Posted June 10, 2011 Well 1000 lbs of Black has about the same "Heave" as 450lbs of TNT so it still makes a fair bang.... Corning (which one news report said was the process where the explosion happened) is I understand one of the more dangerous parts of the production process I grew up about 30 miles east of Hazardvile (named after a chap with the name of Hazard not because of the plant) CT where a lot of powder was made for the use of the Union during the late unpleasantness and I recall as a boy scrambling about the ruins of the plant and places where the corning was done had amazingly thick walls Does the US military still use black as a booster charge between the primer and the main charge in artillery? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Apache Hawk 60642 Posted June 11, 2011 Share Posted June 11, 2011 Ah loves da' smell of Holey Black inda mornin' Smell like.............................................. A CLEAN STAGE !!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Driftwood Johnson, SASS #38283 Posted June 11, 2011 Share Posted June 11, 2011 Does the US military still use black as a booster charge between the primer and the main charge in artillery? Howdy I dunno about inside artillery shells, but some of the bags of powder used in 16" naval guns still have a pad of about 10 pounds of Black Powder sewed at the rear end. The Black Powder is called an initiator. Usual charge for the 16" guns is four powder bags. Each silk bag is filled with 40 pounds of large grain nitro powder. Only the last bag to be rammed in place has the Black Powder initiator charge sewn in place. When the breech is closed, the Black Powder initiator is to the rear. The gun is fired by a 'cartridge' that looks a lot like a 38 Special blank. It ain't a 38 Special blank, but it looks like one. When this 'cartridge' fires, it ignites the Black Powder at the rear of the last bag, Black Powder being much easier to ignite than the large nitro grains. The Black Powder then ignites the main nitro charge. My Dad spent most of WWII in Kansas making bazooka fuel for Hercules Powder. (Alliant Powder today) The buildings all had one blow away wall facing out onto the prairie. One building housed the operation for extruding the fuel through a thick steel plate to form it into sticks to put inside the rockets. Luckily Dad was not present the day that building exploded. They found the steel plate about a mile away. Everybody in the building was killed. Corning is the process where Black Powder is ground down into granular form. Hundreds of years ago, Black Powder was just mixed with the three components, Potassium Nitrate (saltpeter), Sulfur, and Charcoal in powder form. It was found that the three components tended to separate from each other if it had to travel for long distances over rutted roads. This caused the powder to loose its potency. So instead of mixing the three components together dry, they were mixed with water and mixed together as a paste. When this mixture dried it was in the form of a cake. The cake was then ground down to make the separate grains of powder. This process became known as corning. The three components get intimately mixed when mixed wet and will not separate from vibration. The corning process at Goex is completely automatic. Personnel only enter the building to load the powder cake before starting the process, and to remove the corned powder afterwards. So no one is present when the grinding is taking place. But there is only one corning mill at Goex, so I suspect they will not be making any more powder until it is replaced. P.S. When a turret blew up on the Iowa in 1969, the Navy concluded that the explosion may have been caused from a powder charge being improperly rammed into the breech. I suspect the BP may have ignited, but I have never seen any confirmation of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Mountain Charlie SASS #43172 Posted June 11, 2011 Share Posted June 11, 2011 Thanks for the update Driftwood. Great post. And that my friends, is why God created SMOKELESS POWDER. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunner Gatlin, SASS 10274L Posted June 11, 2011 Share Posted June 11, 2011 Thanks for the update Driftwood. Great post. And that my friends, is why God created SMOKELESS POWDER. Yuk! God only created that for the weak GG ~ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Texas Phil Peeno #50923 Posted June 11, 2011 Share Posted June 11, 2011 I bet ya they were using plastic powder hopper/measure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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