Gun Powder Flash

[goamules]

Can someone get this thread back somewhere in the neighborhood of photography?

[eddie]

Can someone get this thread back somewhere in the neighborhood of photography?

why?

[goamules]

Can someone get this thread back somewhere in the neighborhood of photography?

why?

Oh, no reason. Keep talking about these flash in the pan ideas if you like.

[Nathan Potter]

Years ago I made my own flash powder for night time animal photography. Don't ask me why - I've always been an inventive type. I used Potassium permanganate (KMnO3) and colloidal aluminum. I could buy the KMnO3 at the time and the aluminum came as paint which I refined using gasoline to remove the solvent complex then dried. The KMnO3 was ground in a morter and pestle to a fine powder then mixed with aluminum dust at about 50:50 ratio by volume. The mixture is percussive so one must avoid any sharp blows. About a cm^3 provides a bright flash and 10 cm^3 is blinding. The duration is almost instantaneous - maybe 50 msec. Color temperature of the burn is high - suitable for daylight color film balance.

Also could use Ammonium Nitrate as the oxidizer but nowadays that stuff is highly monitored and generally unavailable. It was the composition used in the WWI amatol explosive. I suppose other high oxygen bearing oxidizers could be tried, say like Potassium Chlorate or Ammonium Perchlorate, etc.

A number of these would be percussive so very dangerous if one is not familiar explosives manufacturing. A really foolish activity for the uninitiated. In my case I was brought up on a farm and we used black blasting powder for stump and boulder removal and my grandfather had developed an almost fanatical degree of caution in the use of the stuff.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Worker 11811]

If Kent has already been playing with potassium chlorate, substituting magnesium for the sugar would produce a viable flash powder.
However, watch out! It's not stable and can go off if you look at it wrong.

Another type of flash powder can be made from magnesium and potassium nitrate. It would be slightly more stable. Slightly.

Black powder is approx. 75% potassium nitrate already.