Not mentioned is that a black powder distributor can ship a small order of 5 lbs of  black powder.  Not a full case.

Each distributor has different in house rules for shipping.

Here is a list of distributors.

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Three hour drive to get there?  I used to drive that far once or twice a month just to take the wife to the closest Wal-Mart.  Happy wife-happy life.


Before Covid I would buy black powder over the counter at Bass-Pro.  You had to ask for the Powder Manager and he would get it out the magazine in the back room for you.  I do not know if they still do this.   

I am now in OK and Wal-mart is to darn close.  But I have ordered in BP from Back Creek, Buffalo Arms, Graf's and Powder Inc.

Powder Inc is my preferred source   Powder ic. seems expensive, but my last order of 5lbs of Old Eynsford, the price per pound  included shipping and hazmat fee. I think they still do that.

If you want it, you can find it. Just have it drop shipped.

I used a fair amount of Pyrodex CTG in my Garret Sharps .45-70 carbine and it was accurate enough for my purposes back then.  As I recall, 45 gr CTG with 5 gr or so of RS on top fired the 457124 well enough to “hit stuff” at 200 yards.

Way back when, I worked for a company that made Safety Fuse and one day a guy named Bob (forgot his last name) came down from Kansas with a proposal.  He’d rebuilt the Pyrodex plant after Dan Pawlak’s unfortunate demise and was running it for Hodgdon.  Some peculiarity about the formulation made it impossible to recycle the fines back into the process and make new Pyrodex thereby (unlike black powder, where this is routine) and he thought a use might be found for the stuff in Safety Fuse.  He gave me a can of the fines for testing, and being told that I used it, gave me a couple cans of the then-new CTG for my trouble.  We tried the fines in our Lead Tube burns and found it very consistent.  Unfortunately it burned too slowly for the Bureau of Mines Regulations, which stated that 120 sec/yd, +/- 10%, as manufactured, was the legal requirement for selling Safety Fuse.

I asked him what Pyrodex was and he said it was basically Black Powder, with enough nitrate replaced by perchlorate to raise the ignition temperature so you didn’t need the magazine storage and shipping strictures that Black Powder was subject to back then.  There was a small amount of some benzoic acid salt incorporated into it as well.

He told me (chemist to chemist) that since benzoic acid and its salts crystallize into slippery sheets that glide along each other like soap, this additive was what kept the fouling from building up into the accuracy-destroying crusts typical of Black Powder, so many shots could be fired without wiping.

Chemist to chemist, there needed no mention of cleanup afterwards.  I could go out on Plant and see that chloride salts could put a film of rust on stainless steel in a day or so. I used dish detergent and hot water and never had any trouble.

There’s nothing wrong with Pyrodex that 400 years of use and development won’t fix, just like it did Black Powder.  The Luddites that reflexively post “Pyrodex is crap” in every on-Line conversation about it that someone starts would have looked at the stuff they used in Bombards and Arquebuses 400 years ago and opined that nothing was ever going to replace the good old, great old accurate old, powerful old Yew Bow and its cloth yard shaft arrows, never,  never, ever.