![]() Pyrodex is a bit more difficult to ignite than real black powder, and hence is much easier to ship and store safely. Hodgdon also makes a new "replica" powder called "777," with which I have no experience. The best known brand is “Pyrodex,” made by the Hodgdon Corporation. ![]() In recent years “replica" black powder with most of the advantages of real black powder but without its hazards has made significant inroads into the sport-shooting market. On the down side, it’s a dangerous product to manufacture, and shipping it involves considerable hassle, since it’s a true explosive, which smokeless powder is not. The manufacture of black powder has never quite died out, and black powder for sporting guns is still made in the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, and a few other countries. (Remarkably it still has some military use as well: some types of hand grenades use it and it's an accelerant for the very slow-burning smokeless powders used to launch large artillery projectiles!) Black powder's virtues include easy ignition, consistent performance, and stability in storage. ![]() Certainly by the late 1400's hand-held firearms were in the inventory of many kings and warlords and the "hande gonne" was on its way to displacing the armored knight from his position of pre-eminence on the battlefield.īlack gunpowder was the only propellant available for firearms until the late 19 th Century, when what we today refer to as "smokeless" powder was invented. If it took 20-50 years for Bacon's curiosity to be transformed into a practical weapon of war, the chronology is about right. The oldest known depiction of a gun (a crude artillery piece firing an arrow) is in a tapestry of a battle scene dating from about 1365. Its history is obscure, but it was certainly known in Europe by the late 13 th Century its introduction to the West has traditionally been attributed to that remarkable polymath, Friar Roger Bacon. Black powder is a mechanical mixture of sulfur, potassium nitrate, and powdered charcoal. “Black powder” is what used simply to be called “gunpowder,” in the days before "smokeless" nitrocellulose-based propellants existed. The assortment of action types, ammunition choices, and options available to today’s muzzle-loading hunter is so great that about the only thing all these rifles have in common is that they load from the muzzle end using powder and ball driven home with a ramrod. Muzzle-loaders are used on every type of game in North America, and the number of hunters using them increases every season. The selection of weapons available has grown from a few replicas of historic arms to hundreds of models, some indistinguishable from their centerfire counterparts except on close examination. ![]() Many states have created special seasons for hunting with muzzle-loaders. In the last 40 years, shooting and hunting with black powder rifles has evolved from the peculiar hobby of a small coterie of re-enactors and devotees of the “Mountain Man” tradition to a sizable industry. ![]() His vision momentarily obscured by white smoke, a few seconds later he knows he’s killed his first deer, and joined the ranks of those who hunt the way their great-grandfathers did: with a muzzle-loading rifle. Seventy yards away a young hunter raises his rifle and fires. (A slightly different version of this essay was published in Magnum Magazine in South Africa)ĭaybreak on a crackling-cold winter morning in the Virginia mountains: a 3-point whitetail buck hops a fence and puts his nose to the ground, hot on the trail of a doe. ![]()
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