DIY Black Powder pistol cartridges

[Ninurta]

Part Two of "Nitrating the Paper"

So, as I mentioned previously, to precipitate the saltpeter back out of the water solution, I set it in the fridge to chill. It then precipitated solid crystals back out of the solution that looked like this:



   

I poured the water off into a styrofoam cup through another coffee filter (I got hundreds of them) to make sure I caught all of the solids out of it, and then dried the crystals and evaporated the water a bit more, and set it back into the fridge to precipitate some more.
Eventually, the saltpeter crystals got bigger and longer as more of it came out of the solution:



   

I then repeated the process over and over until I recovered all of the unused potassuim nitrate, put it all back into the original nitrating container, and crunched the crystals up:



   

See? I got almost all of it back, and very little - but enough - of it actually got used in the filter paper. Now, it originally comes out of the bottle as a powder instead of these bigger chunks, but that doesn't matter so much. I'm not making gunpowder, just nitrating paper, and these crystals dissolve in hot water same as the powder does.

That's it for the nitration of the paper. Next up is rolling yer own cartridges out of it.

Nin.

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