Do-It-Yourself Gunpowder Cookbook

by Don McLean

Learn how to make gunpowder from such items as dead cats, whiskey, your living room ceiling, manure and maple syrup with simple hand tools and techniques that have been used for centuries. This is a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0873646754
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Paladin Pr
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

do-it-yourself gunpowder cookbook

LOts of good historical info and explanation of use. Not truly a cookbook if one wants to keep all their fingers and other valuable body parts. However, still a good reader written clearly enough to get through to my type hard heads. Roger, Illinois

Excellent

This book delivers. It has valuable recipes to make your own black poweder and a sugar related substitute. This book also means it when it say to make everything from scratch. How to make your own charcoal, getting sulfur from unlikely places, and "Growing" a salt peter bed. Its not a thick book by no means but if you someday find yourself in the situation where you need to make all of these components from scratch this is a great book to have. Just a quick little bit of help. Just because your compost pile is nitre bearing earth your going to be hard pressed to produce salt peter. your better off builiding a nitre bed like the author describes.

Simply Informative and Useful

Iv'e read some drivel that the processes in this book are too hard to follow, or that they take too long to bear fruit. Look, if you don't want to leach out potassium nitrate, go buy it. I won't tell you where I get it, but if your'e making gunpowder you should be resourceful enough to find your own. Charcoal shouldn't be a problem, and you can order large quantities of sulfur for a good price. Also, you can buy all of these items, follow the processes in the book for putting it together, and still pay less for black powder than you would at the store. It's kind of funny, but I had more success with the sugar and rust recipe than with the traditional black powder. The burn rate was absolutely amazing, and the noise from my fence post driver cannon was too. The only reason that the techniques for resting all the ingredients from the earth were included in the book was to give you an idea of how to make powder from the ground up IF YOU HAD TO. You can easily go buy the ingredients, skip to the recipe pages of the book, and make gunpowder. I wouldn't recommend it though, because it's a very interesting book. I'd say the most important part of the book are the safety rules. I can personally attest to the importance of these. Just remember, someday you will accidentally ignite this stuff. It's a fact. So keep your batches small and separated. Also, if your'e making over fifty pounds of it you might consider an explosives manufacturing license.

class act

This book tells you exactly how to make gunpowder from manure, wood, baserock and many other simple around the house and free from the land type materials. I found this book very useful and informative.