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more high prices......
toad67
Member Posts: 13,008 ✭✭✭✭
Or, in normal terms....golly gee
Look what people are paying for some Hodgdon H1000 powder.....
https://www.gunbroker.com/item/875081026
Up over $130 a pound with shipping, and the auction ain't over.......
Look what people are paying for some Hodgdon H1000 powder.....
https://www.gunbroker.com/item/875081026
Up over $130 a pound with shipping, and the auction ain't over.......
Comments
All Winchester and Hodgdon ball / 'spherical' grades are supplied by St. Marks as are nearly all propellants used in US military small arms ammo, the US government having decided way back in the 1950s with 7.62 adoption that this type would be the norm, sniper and special purpose ammo aside.
Ramshot / Accurate ball powder comes from PB Clermont in Belgium. Hodgdon extruded grades and IMR-8208 XBR from Thales / ADI in Mulwala, NSW, Australia. Other than 8208 XBR, IMR extruded rifle powders are also made by a General Dynamics Corp owned plant in Valleyfield, Ontario, Canada. (Hodgdon owns the IMR brand name and marketing rights IIRC.) This plant also makes some Accurate brand extruded numbers. All Vihtavuori powders come from the town of that name in Finland.
Alliant 'Reloder' extruded grades were all made by Bofors in Sweden until a few years ago, but some recent additions such as Re17 and Re33 are sourced from Nitrochemie Wimmins AG in Switzerland. Alliant has also started using spherical grades from St. Marks.
Health & Safety and the EPA is the primary reason that all extruded powders are made outside of the USA. Ball types manufacture uses non-inflammable / explosive slurries with material piped between processes until the little balls are distilled out at a late stage for chemical treatments and grading. This method also allows old out of date propellants to be recycled alongside fresh ingredients reducing costs.
Extruded powders start by dissolving cellulose in powerful acids, a dangerous exothermic process and whose products are immediately highly explosive and inflammable, then further inherently dangerous processes and solvents are used to convert 'guncotton' into usable propellants. Many of the materials used are corrosive and toxic, likewise creating waste and pollution issues that have to be dealt with nowadays, not just dumped into waste ground or rivers as would once have been done.
All this makes the manufacture of this type inherently riskier which in this day and age is also much more expensive. A guy in the handloading powder business told me years ago that the EPA hadn't banned extruded powder manufacture, but its regulations were so onerous that any such produced in the country would be so expensive, nobody would buy them.