Burn, Baby, Burn - Brief Article

Guns Magazine, Dec, 1999 by Charles E. Petty

The reloader has more choices The than ever. Not only are multiple styles and weights in every popular caliber available, but accuracy has improved greatly. That's mostly because of better bullets, although advances in powder and primers have helped.

The area of canister-grade propellants for reloaders has seen a lot of changes -- especially in the last 10 to 20 years. Gunpowder is still made as it has been for most of the century. During World War II Olin developed the ball powder process, which uses surplus military powders, and competes with extruded powders made by DuPont and others. They have refined it over the years to produce a great variety of propellants.

So even though the manufacturing methods have been relatively constant, powders have changed a lot. If you look at an old loading manual you'll find that there would only be a few powders listed for any given cartridge. A new book could have 10 or more.

What has changed is the burning rate of the powder. Even though the basic chemistry is the same, the manufacturers have much better control over the process. Instead of one or two powders in a burning range that work well for the .30-'06 (just an example) there may be a dozen. This flexibility helps us find the combination that wrings the last tad of accuracy potential from our gun/bullet combination.