So if I understand what I read above correctly, 777 will ruin your barrel because of perchlorate unless you use a solvent. Yet Hodgen's claim to fame with it is you only need to use water. I think we need to take a poll of how many people have ruined barrels, because I have not heard of any yet. I am not trying to be argumentative, but if this is true nobody would being buying their product because it would be ruining barrels and from what I have read in this forum everyone that uses 777 loves it because of the water clean up.
Bullseye-First of all 777 is allegedly an improved product that addresses
the deficiencies of Pyrodex that Hodgdon never acknowleged in the first place, hmmm ? However I believe they use a good bit less Perchlorate
than Pyrodrek. It's also quite interesting that 777's popularity is based on the simple water clean up when real Black powder readily cleans up with
water and always has, sounds like with 777 the media is the message
they create or enhance the belief in common BP myths then capitalize on it, sounds rather disingenuous to me, and then all the pidgeons that are getting ripped off then go forth parrot the pitch.
As far as the barrel damage there have been any number of barrels damaged and or completely destroyed by using Pyrodex and the Bore butter bore conditioning technique, there have also been plenty of barrels ruined by casual ML shooter's that believe that Pyrodex is somehaow non or less corrosive because it's a modern BP substitute, I encountered this while teaching hunters safety when several of the Dad's took exception to my assertion that Pyrodex is in fact considerably more corrosive than real black powder
a number of them got really bent out of shape as some of them have some very healthy ego's and if they'd been using it, this couldn't possibly be true as they literally in some cases can't be wrong. which lead me to do a test where we took a degreased slab of boiler plate and burned 70 gr. piles of GOEX (Moosic production) Pyrodex RS, Elephant (late 97 lot) and even Bullseye as a control group we put the plate behind one of the guys barn where it was sheltered from the rain. after 3 weeks we found the Pyrodex area had some serious pit corrosion under the surface rust, the GOEX had about half as much surface rust and almost imperceptable pitting and the Elephant had a very light rust with no pitting evident and the bullseye spot actually had a little rust starting of course other area's of the plate were starting to develop some rust as well S. Wisconsin is fairly humid. Some of the Pyrodex adherents were still not moved so I borrowed a bore scope from a barrel maker friend and we scrubbed up thier barrels and examined them and several were a total mess with very pronounced deep pitting in the chamber and several inches beyond and the remainder of the bore pitted enough that they'd be pretty much beyond rehabilitation, often casual shooters that use Pyrodex wouldn't even be aware of the damage to their barrels untill they were absolute black holes as the stuff is loaded with graphite which allows you to shoot without wiping because the fouling acts like a lubricant and attains an equillibria of fouling after 5 or 6 shots, and many of these people have never even taken a close look down their bores, and I'd imagine virtually none of them have ever given thier bores an examination with a bore scope.
if you don't find me credible sign on to the BP_L listserver and ask about Pyrodex and bore butter ruined barrels etc and see what kind of responses you get and these people are a group of leading competition shooters, advanced rifle cranks, barrel makers, and other industry figures
or take a trip to Friendship or any major regional national or regional
BP shoot either ML or BPCR and see how many cans of Pyrodex or any of the rest of that expensive garbage are on the loading benches of any of the competitiors, and believe me any numer of those folks would be using it if it provided any discernable advantage or in some cases even if it was just the rough equivalent of Black Powder regardless of cost.
I don't actually care if some of you are getting boned big time or even if you ruin your barrels, in certain cases I find it highly ammusing, but I do like to warn others particularly the newbies as I'd like them to become serious BP enthusiasts so our sport continues long into the future and getting started out right and avoiding some of the really expensive mistakes that many of us have made along the way. In my case I wasted a small fortune trying every new scam faux BP that came on the market, and ruined 2 nice barrels, the only benefit was to my lawn which in the case of Pyrodex has some very lush growth where I sprinkled it.
And the more people that buy the substitute crap the sooner the anti's will be able to ban or highly restrict real Black Powder which is a truly amazing propellant.
fredj
