I’m sincerely sorry about what happened to your relative, afterhoursarmory.
I had a legitimate duty of training with demo for a few years—mostly materials that were very stable and efficient. Yes, black powder can be very dangerous. Depends on what’s done with it. It’s relatively very bulky, smoky, dirty, flashy stuff, too.
And oh, yeah, BenLurkin, if in any kind of container (a building, for example), it can make a big blast, and with fairly flammable materials around, a fire. Black powder was notorious for unintentional, incidental fires in a few battles in the 1800s.
Black powder can also work very nicely and surprisingly accurately in a well built muzzle loader or even a cartridge similar to what was originally made for it. I’m too lazy to do all of that cleaning afterwards, though. ;-)
“I’m too lazy to do all of that cleaning afterwards, though. “
I hear ya. I own several BP weapons ranging from .32 to .58 caliber. The 58 shoots a 600 gr civil war replica projectile. My favorite is my Walker. I know I should not do this, but just cannot help it. I load each hole in the cylinder level full with 3F, then force the ball into the chamber until flush. Talk about kick, talk about bang. This of course causes the loading lever to come loose and fall down, which the gun was notorious for in the first place. It’s fairly accurate when reasonably loaded, with good projectile penetration.
IMO to do a good job of cleaning, it takes a minimum of 1/2 hour per weapon. The frontiersman did not have that luxury, probably did not have time to run an animal lard patch through it. To replicate this, I have purposely left some of mine uncleaned for months. As long as they stay dry, rust does not set up.