and7barton

Here you go, this was the first batch of BP that I ever milled (4 hours, straight out of the mill)Clicky Clicky. It was not even made with charcoal but activated carbon instead. This is slower than BP made with Willow or similar charcoal. How does yours compare?

ha ha ha ! - ;-)
Something not quite right there !

Making BP for my own muzzleloaders is what brought me to pyrotechnics in the first place.

After tiring of paying for Goex, I started making my own, and ball milling dry has produced as good of a powder as commercial, better than Elephant, for that matter.

IMHO, if you got "disappointing" results, it wasn't because of dry ball milling, if it was done correctly and the chemicals were up to par.

Well, it was disappointing to ME - Colleagues reckoned it was fine, but I felt that I could enhance it a bit further.

Sounds like you were doing something wrong if you were dissapointed, ball-milling should produce very fast powder indeed...

And what's the deal with washing up liquid, never heard of anyone doing that before...

The single drop of washing up liquid reduces the surface tension of the water and enhances its wetting ability. This enables the dissolved KNO3 to be absorbed to a greater extent into the charcoal's micropores.

seems a lot of work for what can be a very simple procedure if you already have a ball mill!

I dont do any of that and have compared samples of BP against commercial firework powder to find identical results.

I don't use it for pyrotechnics - I use it for muzzle-loading artillery.
The results from simply ball-milling (even with added 2-ton pressing), were disappointing, hence the extra treatment. In fact, I have an experimental batch that's "maturing" in the liquid stage for a six-month period, like a wine, just to see if it can improve still further.

So we can safely say the mallee isn't good for for making fast burning bp then. I'll see about getting some willow then. Does anyone know where i might be able to find some?

You can get airfloat willow charcoal on Ebay.
Some advice that might help, once you've got the decent charcoal.
I ball-mill my batch for 24 hours, with a drop of washing up liquid in the mix. I also use distilled water - NOT tap water. After the milling run I tip out into a dish, and scrape out any mud that has built up on the drum end caps, also putting it in the dish. Then I remove the balls.
Then - A STEEPING stage. I bottle up the mix and leave it to stand for up to a week, with a shake up a couple of times a day. This allows the nitrate to thoroughly soak into the micropores of the charcoal.
Next - tip out into a shallow plastic tray and allow to dry at room temperature. The purpose of this is to allow a good proportion of the water content to slowly evaporate, and to allow the nitrate solution within the micropores to recrystallise. This stage lasts for up to a week. After this stage the product is lumpy and damp and can be picked up as dampish clods with the fingers.
I then place this material onto a warming plate at around 75 F.
A week at this elevated temperature with occasional breaking up with the fingers, until clumping ceases to occur and the material remains unclumped. I then rub it through a coarse sieve with the fingers. Then further drying on the warming plate and more rubbing through the sieve (a plastic sieve).
When thoroughly dry the product ceases to dirty the fingers very much.
At this point I dispense into storage jars.
It's a good fast powder.
I developed this method after much experimentation.