The Good Old Days may be here again for most of the shooting sports, but shipping restrictions and detestable laws have made life hard for blackpowder shooters. Back in November, Roy Hill reported on the trials and tribulations of feeding his flintlock with the original blend of three herbs and spices: 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur.
Modern non-explosive blackpowder substitutes like Pyrodex and Shockey’s Gold may do a bang-up job of launching your Minie balls downrange, but they’re notoriously useless for flashing the pans of flintlock rifles. After talking to Chris Hodgdon (yes, that Hodgdon), I may have found a solution, at least for blackpowder shooters with a lot of friends.
Individual purchasers have to comply with a bizarre patchwork of local and federal laws, intrusive reporting requirements and outrageous shipping fees which make it nearasdammit impossible to buy more than a pound of two of ‘the good stuff’ at a time. But a unique shipping exemption allows certain distributors to ship much larger quantities to ‘shooting clubs,’ or even groups of blackpowder-shooting friends. (If you live in California, it would help if one of your shooting buddies lived in a neighboring state like Arizona, Nevada or Oregon, but you didn’t hear it from me.)
Click here for a list of Goex distributors, who can ship you (in a single huge shipment) the blackpowder as you and all your buddies can burn in year. With a muzzle-loading cannon. (Just don’t go all Mythbusters with it, m’kay?)
And happy shooting, from TTAG.
This works – the Ee-da-How Longrifles (SW Idaho shooting club) orders large amounts of black powder, stores in a magazine, and sells to club members at cost. Saves a bunch of money over individual purchases.
We are an-NRA/Idaho State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. affiliate, a non-profit, and maintain the Black’s Creek Public Shooting Range (south of Boise, ID) for the Idaho Dept of Fish and Game. See photos of our range at http://www.blackscreekrange.com, and see schedules of our shoots at http://www.blackscreekrange.com/club.
That was a shameless plug for the club and range.
Would this be the same Ee-da-How Longrifles that shoots off mustkets during local parades?
I’m from Meridian.
Probably – we have a pretty wide selction of members with different interests – muzzleloading, black powder cartridge rifle silhouette, .22LR silhouette, etc. the range is also used for shoots by IAWCA (Idaho Automatic Weapons Collectors Assoc) and the cowboy action shooting folks (went blank on their name).
If it helps our readers, by all means plug away.
Interesting in the 8 years this article was written things have only gotten worse, no knew articles have been written and it’s even harder to find the stuff locally at any stores, and almost impossible to get bulk even if you own a cannon. I can’t count the number of 1lb plastic bottles I have gone through in a year.
Sadly one of the only places I found to buy in bulk is still more expensive per pound then buying it in 1lb bottles from Grafs and Sons.
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