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<blockquote data-quote="Wolf1066" data-source="post: 5245733" data-attributes="member: 88680">Love it!I look at some of the preconceptions that people have about our &quot;primitive&quot; ancestors and think &quot;no, people weren't that stupid or unobservant back then.Bloody Victorians and their &quot;historical progress&quot; bollox!&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I've got a friend who's into black powder shooting who laments that modern powder is not as good as earlier powders - according to descriptions of achievable burns in firearms, none of the&nbsp; modern powders measure up to what the powders back then were expected to&nbsp; do so it seems that making decent gunpowder is one of the skills that got lost along the way.&nbsp; While, on the face of it, it seems pretty straightforward, there's quite a bit of art to it and it relies on other industries that had quite a bit of art of their own - like charcoal-making.&nbsp; Charcoal, so far as my own research leads me to believe, is the key factor in the quality of your powder and different charcoals from different woods - or charcoal blends - give different results.&nbsp; It appears that somewhere along the way, the secret &quot;recipe&quot; for the right charcoal and processes for high quality BP got lost (probably with the increase in use of smokeless powders and the decrease in demand for black powder) and the modern stuff is a &quot;reinvention&quot; based on the old basic recipe but without the full understanding of the art.Not even the top GOEX powders perform as the old powders were expected to - so much for &quot;progress&quot;.And that's just one of many &quot;lost arts&quot; I've heard of.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Wolf1066, post: 5245733, member: 88680"] Love it! I look at some of the preconceptions that people have about our "primitive" ancestors and think "no, people weren't that stupid or unobservant back then. Bloody Victorians and their "historical progress" bollox! :D I've got a friend who's into black powder shooting who laments that modern powder is not as good as earlier powders - according to descriptions of achievable burns in firearms, none of the modern powders measure up to what the powders back then were expected to do so it seems that making decent gunpowder is one of the skills that got lost along the way. While, on the face of it, it seems pretty straightforward, there's quite a bit of art to it and it relies on other industries that had quite a bit of art of their own - like charcoal-making. Charcoal, so far as my own research leads me to believe, is the key factor in the quality of your powder and different charcoals from different woods - or charcoal blends - give different results. It appears that somewhere along the way, the secret "recipe" for the right charcoal and processes for high quality BP got lost (probably with the increase in use of smokeless powders and the decrease in demand for black powder) and the modern stuff is a "reinvention" based on the old basic recipe but without the full understanding of the art. Not even the top GOEX powders perform as the old powders were expected to - so much for "progress". And that's just one of many "lost arts" I've heard of. [/QUOTE]

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