Greenman

could anyone tell me would a 6 tonne bottle jack be enough for pressing black powder.

To be honest, i have been using a 2 tonn for quite a while. The only reason i upgraded it recentely was for the need of pressing bigger rockets. I used my two tonns for pressing pucks, small rockets and fountians, and it worked wonders!

The choice is up to you, but if your thinking about pressing pucks only i suggest 2 tonn is good enough. Unless your going for real big scale. Keep in mind that the more tonns you go, for the harder it will be to conscruct a relaiable pressbody. My two tonn body was a very easy set up, just a few 2x4" wood pieces bolted together. However if you want your press to handle anything coming in, you might go for a 10tonn. More tonnes is futile.

Some people seems to succeed getting fast BP with newspaper charcoal. They claim no ballmilling is needed to get lift-like quality, which would be sufficiently fast for your bangers. I have personally never tried this, but can anyone confirm this is a myth? Or is it really something to go for?

For beginners without mills it would be rather interesting. I am aware that there are some topics on the subject, but i post this with the intent of helping our fellow pyro without ball mill.

As stated, proceed with great caution. Pyro is hobby that doesn't let you a first chance.

Today's results were rather positive. It turned for 45mins with 50grams of BP in each jar. Nothing special happened to the temperature. Nor did i notice any signs of sparks in the jars. The BP which was a plain greenmix at start is now lift quality. 45min lift is, for me, a great save of time.

So I will continue using it, as it worked out good today. However one should not conclude potentional safety with a single success. Il put a warning if anything goes wrong.

Stay safe

I've mentioned planetary mills here before, but no one has ever seemed very interested!

I'm actually in the early stages of building one.

Sorry, as i am a little new to this forum i have not read the whole thread yet.
Building one yourself? Thats not a easy task I suppose you will buy the jars? Mine is using two 10cm ID. rock hard jars made of quartz. I am not sure, but i recall reading that one could use jars of alumina. In that case, it would be possible to make yourself.

Tomorrow i will try going on slow speed with a batch of BP. All safety measures possible are taken, but i am still feeling a little bad about this. I know the lid is supposed to deal with an eventual explosion from inside, but the a jar of ceramics tightened up with locking mechanism half full of BP would be pretty bad.

My greatest concern here is that somehow the temperature will rise within the jar and make the BP go off. I have not read the whole manual yet, but i am to understand that the locking mechanism will release itself when a given temperature is reached within one of the jars. It is also possible that the balls, having higher speed than in a normal mill, will produce sparks. However i doubt this. Taking in account that this was designed to use by proffesional chemists, i dont think they would let such i danger come into play without mentioning it. But as said, its never "safe".

I will post the results of my test.

Does anyone in here know how much time one acctualy does save by using this kind of mill?

People. Today i have been so fortunate of succeeding a planetary ballmill from my job. They were going to trash it, and asked if anyone had use of it. The problem was that only two of the four jars worked, and it had malfuctional closing lid so it was very noisy.
From what i have tried, it is incredibly faster at milling jobs, than my older mill! I tried my first batch today and i did a perfect milled tigertail comp. after 30min of milling. Has anyone any experience with these mills, or by any chance owing one? I was just wondering how safe it was to mill BP for example? The TT batch seemed to work wonders.

I understand that private people owning planetary mills are few, because of their excessively high price.